


Chicken and Waffles

by SC182



Category: Fast and the Furious Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, F/M, Homophobic Language, Jealousy, M/M, Snark, Vince's mouth, best bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-03
Updated: 2012-09-03
Packaged: 2017-11-13 11:26:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SC182/pseuds/SC182
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU where no one was ever a cop or a criminal. Everyone's legit and DomandBrian still happen and Vince is woefully confused and unhappy about it. Oh, and Roman Pearce plays a therapist, Mia can't cook, Letty is <i>sensitive</i>, and Vince and Dom may have a pair of matching best bro tattoos. Crack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Rated: R-- Because of Vince's (especially Vince's) and Rome's mouths. Epic douche alert.
> 
> Disclaimer: Property of Universal, Justin Lin and Gary S. Thompson. I'm just borrowing them for a moment.
> 
>  **A/N** : Written back in September (2011). It's been sitting on the shelf since the start of football season.
> 
>  **A/N 2** : This is Crack in many ways. My Vince is, well, very Vince like mixed with a touch of Kenny Powers from HBO's Eastbound and Down. Rome is a good sport and tries his best to deal with Vince's thickheaded douchey attitude. Vince is far from PC and he relishes coming up with new nicknames to describe Brian.

He’d been staring down at his plate for the last ten minutes; long enough to make the waitress roll her eyes out of sheer boredom. If it had been some other time, her sideways glances could just as easily been construed as lukewarm interest. Instead she sauntered away to attend the booths and tables in her section, where the patrons would be appreciative of her attention. The contents of his plate became ten minutes colder as his attention receded and the yellow walls covered with autographs and kitschy tribute art to the seventies soul, funk, and lowrider scene tunneled around him.  
  
All he saw were blurred colors and shadows as his mind lowered its shade, and decided to cartoonishly step out for an undetermined amount of time. Getting here had been easy. Auto-pilot had taken over and had carried him here to a place where he found comfort, often at the price of under ten bucks.  
  
For once Vince wasn’t seeing the heap of golden paradise laid out before him. Instead he was caught in the invisible, but strong as hell thrall of Dom’s voice and the way it sank into a harsh growl like an angry junkyard compactor eating old steel, telling him unflinchingly, “You embarrass me.”  
  
Like a dog with its tail tucked between its legs, he stalked away. Vince turned his back and walked out of the door, as staying was clearly not an option.  
  
He tore out of the house and down the block with the ghost of his recklessness at seventeen, formerly hopped up on anger at his old man and the world at large, on his back. Back then, he’d been intent on raising literal hell under the scorched treads of his tires over concrete. Leaving the house now with the heavy stares of Letty, Leon, Jesse, and Mia at his back felt like old habit now—a terrible, bitter habit. It was one that this old coyote couldn’t quite seem to shake.  
  
But in the here and now, he wasn’t seventeen, hadn’t been for a long time, and his exit was less tempestuous and more simmering surly. As Dom’s words hit home, the shock of their intended effect was absorbed, taking the wind out of his sails, and laying him out with one sharp blow.  
  
So his feet and tires had carried him here—back to the confines of warm fluffy, crispy, golden brown comfort. This was his not so cold comfort, should he finally dig in to eat it. The lump in his throat wouldn’t give an inch and Dom’s genuine fury had Vince more backed up than his  
  
Nana’s old toilet after Easter dinner.  
  
And it was all _his_ fault.  
  
Not Vince’s. Not even a little bit.  
  
Okay, maybe, just a little bit.  
  
 _Him_ , on the other hand, definitely his fault.  
  
Vince was pretty certain, his hand to a stack of Bibles certain, that _he_ had all but put witchcraft on Dom to make him flip on the sexual spectrum with the ease of a Mario Kart driver slipping off a turtle shell. Instead of feeling so sour at Dom’s betrayal, he should have been reveling in the impending feeling of _I-told-you-so_. Hell, he’d warned Dom about going off to Vegas, because shit always tended to happen in Vegas when there was no supervision. Case in point, Dom coming back to L.A. apparently attached at the hip to Britney Spears’ male doppelganger. If it wasn’t for Mr. Snow Flake, Vince would be chowing down on Dom’s barbeque and Mia’s—store bought and badly kept secret---everything else.  
  
But no, he’d been exiled, albeit to one of his favorite places ever, by the way. Now he ended up feeling an odd sense of kinship with the old dude from Jason and The Argonauts. The guy from _that_ scene--the one with banquet table and mountains of food and the evil flying monkey people. The poor old dude was plagued by harpies, which were not a sexually transmitted disease as he found out after Mia’s one semester of Classical Lit and a _really_ awkward conversation.  
  
Like Phineas, he’d gotten all the chicken and waffles he can eat until his stomach bottomed out and rumbled dangerously like an overloaded washing machine, but no will to eat it and an unwanted guest who was stalking his plate with eyes so hungry, they were almost jumping out of his head to roll across the table.  
  
Now Vince knew what dealing with harpies felt like. He’d practically surrendered his best friend, his brother from another mother, to one.  
  
Again, Vince was reminded as his guest cleared his throat that the Mr. Frosty was messing everything up. Worse than the world’s largest termite, he was infiltrating their family, changing Dom, twisting everything and generally fucking up Vince’s universe. Why? Vince had no clue.  
  
Well…maybe, he did.  
  
Leon always rambled about this sort of random stuff after Jesse drifted off into his one-sided conversations about Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots, Transformers, Star Trek techno voodoo scribbled in Wired and Popular Mechanics that went way above their heads. Despite the years of knowing Leon, Vince had yet to travel to the same level of invisible space that called to Leon when he zoned out with ultra peaceful expressions that reminded Vince of cut grass, flowers and diaper commercials. It was the same expression he used to wear when they were younger and chilling out on the back porch at Leon’s mom’s house, smoking J’s that Vince would go to his grave believing belonged to Leon’s ma. Life offered some concrete certainties, like the immutable fact that old hippies always had the best stashes.  
  
“Karma,” Leon had said, his eyes pink and wet at the corners like the leftovers of a good nap. “—comes back like a boomerang and it’ll smack you on the back of the head if you’re not looking.”  
  
To Vince, this wasn’t so much a hit upside the head, but a bitchslap with a steel glove.  
  
Again, _his_ fault, not Vince’s, even if the jury was out on the matter.  
  
Vince wondered if this was karmic payback for pretending to be sick all those Sundays instead of going to church or breaking his Nana’s potted rose bush when he was ten, while pretending to Hulk-out and blaming the whole thing on his little cousin Tony instead. Or maybe it was telling Jesse that vampires were real by trying to bite him with his fake vampire blinged out grill—true fact, that prank had been funny as hell. Biggest reason for karmic justice: being a lazy ungrateful dick, who hadn’t found the guy who’d saved him and his arm after the accident.  
  
If Vince had to take a guess, he’d figure that the last one had to be the reason the universe suddenly hated him.  
  
As if his pest clocked the exact moment Vince had reconciled that he might have had some potential culpability, though small as it was, in the current state of friction within Team Toretto, his guest opened his big fat mouth, then stuck a piece of Vince’s waffle in it.  
  
“You gonna sit here all day crying into your waffles, bruh?” Vince glared with frosty silence, and his guest returned his glare with one of his own, teeming with an extra spicy serving of _dude needs a timeout and I’m itching to put him there_ burning in his dark eyes.  
  
There was no blinking first for Vince. No one ever beat him in a staring contest, except Dom and Mia, because the former was, well, Dom, and the latter had just unintentionally poisoned him with her tuna salad. Speaking of tuna salad, Mr. Malibu Barbie actually _liked_ Mia’s tuna salad. Nobody liked Mia’s tuna salad. This was reason number far too many to support Vince’s belief that Mr. Malibu Barbie was full of shit.  
  
As he watched his waffle disappear down his stalker’s throat, he tightened his grip on his fork, pondering whether stabbing would be a legitimate punishment for food theft. So that there was no way Big Mouth would be getting the upper hand, Vince sank back into the booth, mumbling through pursed lips, because scowling required silence to be done properly.  
  
“I’m not cryin’,” he muttered. Because he clearly wasn’t. His red eyes were clearly from allergies.  
  
His uninvited shadow smiled brightly like he was mugging for a Facebook photo and said, before pulling Vince’s plate towards his side of the table, “I’m sure the reason they put syrup on the table is cuz it goes better with this--”, meaning the stack of crunchy and soft chicken and waffles, “—and not the whack bitterness of your tired ol’ man tears.”  
  
Letty had always said that he was barely housetrained on his best days. And in a minute he was totally going to be living up, or was that down to her expectations, by growling and possibly leaping across the table to get back his precious chicken and waffles.  
  
As Vince cocked his head to the side, a gesture that all who knew him would recognize as the precursor to a strike like a rattler shaking its tail, he locked eyes with a table of little old ladies, all dressed in church gear, and when one cracked a shy smile at him his swirling anger was snuffed out worse than a lit cigarette burned down to the filter.  
  
Bummer, man.  
  
On principle, Vince was an asshole to just about everyone. The few people who were excluded from the long arm of his wrath were few and far between. The list boiled down mostly to his Nana and his Ma, because not even Mia escaped the vortex Vince’s twenty-four seven king asshole anti-charisma. Old ladies were his kryptonite. Not in a kinky dirty way, but his steel innards always turned to jelly under the weight of a geriatric pout of disapproval.  
  
His latent sense of triumph was diminished suddenly. The slight waning of his attention earned him the indignity of staring at the bastard, who had somehow managed through some art of manipulation of time and space to clear over half his plate.  
  
“What the hell?” Vince looked across the table in askance.  
  
Vince blinked once, scowled twice, more severely each time, before dragging his plate back. “You owe another, Big Mouth.” He slid the plate back after his disappointing inspection.  
  
Roman Pearce aka Rome aka the giant pain in Vince’s ass rolled his eyes, then speared another piece of syrup soaked waffle into his mouth. He chewed on it with open full sticky lips, mimicking the same passion of a cow chewing cud and twice as little shame for an admitted food thief.  
  
Rome swallowed and shrugged, “No problem, ‘s not like six ninety-five all-you-can-eat chicken and waffles are gonna break the bank, y'know?. I’m always hungry, but not that hungry, man. But, anyway, this plate was mine from the jump; I think you’re just a little slow on the uptake.”  
  
Crossing his arms over his chest, putting countless inches of ink on display, Vince waited for the rest of Rome’s explanation of his randomly assembled bit of logic. Most people—right thinking people—would recognize this as a sign to quit flapping their gums and back the hell away from him, but Rome was … _special_ in that After School Special kind of way. Vince was absolutely convinced of this.  
  
Since Rome was being less than forthcoming, Vince figured he’d prompt him to continue. “How’d you figure the plate I ordered in a place that I didn’t invite you to in the first place is yours?”  
  
Rome separated another crispy on the outside, juicy in the middle wing that smelled like manna straight from heaven, and popped it in his mouth. The subsequent bite was noisy, so obnoxiously loud that the table of old ladies that had harshed Vince’s ire gave Rome justifiable reproachful side glances. Just like that Vince knew Karma wasn’t completely against him.  
  
Using a fork gunked up with waffle bits to punctuate his points, Rome waved it about like a sharp laser pointer for his impending presentation of Vince’s faults. “Because,” he began, paused and savored the maple sweetness on the surface of his bottom lip, “your little temper tantrum earned my ass the honor of following your PMSing old tail, instead of getting real up close and personal with the big man’s barbeque spread and bottles and bottles of ice cold beer. So yeah, you do owe me.”  
  
“It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything,” Vince railed, growing more pissed as the last of his stress relief disappeared into Roman Pearce’s black hole of a gullet.  
  
The fork, which was an instrument of horror and destruction to Vince’s growing appetite, tapped out a noisy rhythm as Rome smacked his lips in satisfaction, asking, “You sure about that?” He finished off the last fluffy bite, smirking the entire time. “From where my hungry ass is sitting, I’d say—yeah, it’s all your fault. Think about it and I mean, seriously, bruh, think about it.”  
  
And Vince did.

* * *

  
  
 _Three Weeks Earlier_  
  
He looked down at his phone once more before closing the text screen. The text wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Actually, it was expected; it was a chain text sent from Mia to the usual suspects about dinner. Dinner between the six of them was a standing weekly date on Sundays, Wednesdays, some Fridays and Saturdays, and all birthdays. Dom’s barbeque alone was enough cause for celebration. But there was something about Mia’s three-line text, declaring dinner at six that had him scratching the stubble on his chin and eyeballing the emoticon smiley face suspiciously.  
  
It was Thursday after all and not a typical family dinner night.  
  
But Vince decided then and there that everything was probably on the level and closed the text. Dinner was dinner, and Vince was not one to turn down free food. Ever. Any night where Vince didn’t have to nuke something, pick-up or wait in line at Fat Burgher or a taco stand qualified as a good night.  
  
Dinner out of the blue shouldn’t have be a big deal, but his gut was telling him something, and normally when his gut decided to speak up it was more precise and accurate than the KTLA morning forecast. So either the strange knot in his stomach was either instinct kicking up a little dust or old chili from the fridge making a veritable battleground of his intestines.  
  
A short raspy chuckle filled the quiet space of his office. He wished for a cigarette to fully complement one of his fleeting moments of reflection, but he’d promised Dom no smoking in the shop. Being that it was a fire hazard and such, and the shop was filled to the brim with flammable materials, his decision not to light up indoors seemed to be a sensible decision.  
  
Despite all the turns his life had taken, he would have never predicted ending up here. Here happened to be an office, inside a respectable shop, with the bold black letters across the glass surface of the door proclaiming the person behind it to be the manager.  
  
 _Him,_ a manager.  
  
If anyone had suggested that Vincent—always call him Vince though, especially for your own health—Andrew Keller would grow up be an almost respectable citizen, because being completely respectable wasn’t how he rolled, he might’ve punched said person in the face and told them to get the fuck out.  
  
This was not how Vince expected his life to be.  
  
His past was a jumbled ball, hard and sticky like over-chewed gum, mucked with the oily and gritty parts of an extended adolescence. One where his impenetrable sense of invulnerability, lust for all things fast, loud and shiny almost coalesced into a near perfect storm of disaster. It nearly cost him his life, Dom his freedom and another broken home for a group of prematurely parentless survivors. But that time, no moms or dads were walking away or dying too young; it was just them and their collective lack of decision-making bringing down the house.  
  
As he leaned back in his chair, the faux leather scraping the wall with a hissing sound as he reclined back, Vince kicked his feet up on the corner of the paper and manual strewn desk. It looked nothing like it did when he inherited it. The logical side of him should feel some shame about that, but the realistic part of him figured he should be proud to be sitting behind that desk at all.  
  
Apparently, this was to be one of those days, where sitting behind this desk stood out as strange to him, stranger than almost anything he’d seen while tripping or concussed during his adventurous youth and early adulthood. And thinking back to _Before_ , Vince realized with a tight smirk that no one else would see that like the old Looney Tunes cartoons that he, Dom and Leon used to watch on sparingly few rainy afternoons when they were kids, it all started with a bang.  
  
Cut back to now without the clichéd fade to black, there Vince was, miles of road older and slightly wiser, which was debatable, but most assuredly worse for wear.  
  
There was a less than light knock at his office door, the manager’s door, and a day didn’t pass where he wondered what the hell Dom had been thinking by making him manager of DT’s #2.  
  
Letty stuck her head inside, giving the office a deliberate once over before snapping her head back to look at him. She was chomping at the bit to be back in charge, but an almost lawsuit involving a _malfunctioning_ lift and a rich prick’s foot had a way of changing the administrative hierarchy.  
  
“You going to dinner tonight?” She asked, scowling at the deplorable state of her former desk. The mile-high stack of papers had been entirely absent when Letty had been sitting behind this big chunk of wood with her feet, outfitted in her favorite battered leather steel-toed boots, propped up on the corner.  
  
Vince’s feet defiantly stayed in place. “Yeah, unless you know something I don’t.” For a second there, Vince caught the sudden twinkle in Letty’s big brown eyes. Over the years, he’d seen all varieties of Letty’s expressions, the smooth tilt of her smirk to the thunderous scowl that would send wise men, including him, running for cover.  
  
The little flicker of _something_ across her face was enough to support his gut feeling. Letty shrugged, without looking away or giving him the slightest of additional clues. “Nope, just the usual but--” she stepped through the door, kicked it shut and leaned back against the glass.  
  
When she crossed her arms over her chest, the gesture added an alluring quality to her priestess of metal mystique. It also did something great to her boobs, which earned him the ghostly rebuke of _pig_ from the bit of Letty that lived within his conscience and tended to mentally karate chop him whenever he got too out of hand.  
  
As if she heard the whole mental exchange, Letty’s lips stretched into a devilish smile. “Leon told me that Jesse told him,” gotta love their unending game of telephone, “that Mia’s whipping up frijoles again,” which was code for Mia opening canned beans and passing them off as her own. The girl, ahem, woman couldn’t be entirely perfect, otherwise she would be untouchable.  
  
Letty wasn’t done spreading the news. “Apparently, there may also be a cake,” Letty said with the apprehension of a spy sharing insider information with the enemy.  
  
Black beans and a cake, an odd combination surely, and several things became startling clear in that moment.  
  
One, Mia never attempted to cook unless it was a special occasion. That was one reason special occasions around the Toretto house had become a living embodiment of a Choose Your Own Adventure Game. Mia generally stayed within the boundaries of simples fixes—tossed salad, toast, and boiled eggs. As much as he loved her, and yes, he was still holding out hope that Mia would let him take her to that little restaurant on Ventura, which boasted the best damn Cuban food in the city. There was an extra incentive in the form of dancing at the restaurant—live, hot booming salsa that he could also move to, whether it was through practice at the dutiful hands of a dear tia or a natural talent, Vince would never tell. It was simply safe to assume that he would never step on her feet either.  
  
Back to Mia’s culinary crisis, which often saw tuna as a frequent casualty of her culinary efforts, Mia was almost freakishly smart, but anything involving food and more than three steps in the preparation process thwarted her like driving the speed limit did the rest of them. In Vince’s book disaster was spelled M-I-A-‘S T-U-N-A; they all lived in fear and would never forget the hell that had been wrought upon them at the hands of Mia’s sweet lunchtime gesture.  
  
Two, if Mia was indeed going out of her way to cook _complicated_ things, then they were going poisoned… _accidentally_. It would be a smart preemptive gesture to just put a sign up, declaring the shop closed until next Tuesday and calling any customers, who had pick-ups scheduled for Friday and Monday. Because it was almost a definite that they’d be laid low and even a telephone call would be too difficult to orchestrate.  
  
Vince raised his eyes skyward in silent prayer, hoping to reach the deity that aided those without cast iron stomachs.  
  
“Amen,” Letty snickered, having deciphered his exasperated gesture. “I’m with you, V.”  
  
“Is Jess sure the cake isn’t local?” He really hoped the cake was from Trader Joes or wherever as long as Mia and Betty Crocker didn’t meet. The last time Mia had been allowed to flex her culinary muscle, the house had been quarantined by the City Health Department and things that Vince managed to convince himself hadn’t happened, except in his nightmares, happened all over that house.  
  
Horrible, horrible things.  
  
For three days, all Vince saw of everyone else was the occasional flash of ass and elbows as they sprinted off to the closest bathroom. Vince’s head had been buried in the carpet; luckily the old, funky green shag had long since been taken up and replaced with what felt like goose down on his feverish face.  
  
There had been pacts—literal blood oaths sworn to keep Mia out of the kitchen when unsupervised. It was a matter of preventing Mia from accidentally killing them with her good intentions. None of them would ever forget Thanksgiving two years ago.  
  
Letty snapped her fingers in the air, drawing him out of the traumatizing flashback of a true near death experience. She clicked her tongue impatiently, ready to speak her peace and go back to work. “Whatever, just thought I’d give you a head’s up.”  
  
Vince knew he’d definitely owe her, but couldn’t naturally say as much. He crossed one foot over the other, just to see her eyes narrow dangerously. “What? That your good deed of the day?” Letty was at her best when pissed off.  
  
Glaring, her eyes flashed with just the right amount of heat to make him guard his candy stash and maybe his loins for the next week or so. Nothing was sacred, save his bad arm, when it came to revenge from Letty. She wasn’t above dick punches or _augmenting_ the paint on his car to something livelier like Pepto Bismal pink.  
  
“Don’t you like it? This is me putting my conflict resolution skills to work. You know now that anger management’s working so well.”  
  
Anger management, right? He replied, “I can see…that.” He coughed into his fist, barely concealing his raspy sniggers.  
  
“Another thing--”She mocked his attempt to mock her with her version of his braying donkey laugh, only seen when stone cold blitzed out of his mind. Letty made to leave and was poised to walk out the door, when she stopped to call behind her, “Take your feet off my damn desk. If I find one skid mark or scuff, I’ll kick your ass.”  
  
She walked out without another look, slamming the door as she went. Only an idiot would take her words for granted. Trust him, he’d been that idiot once upon a time or twelve. Buried in the internal junk hill of thoughts Vince refused to wade through was the memory of that last ass kicking. Steel-toed boots hurt like a mother no matter who was trying to kick your ribs in.  
  
“Anger management, my ass,” he murmured to himself, lest she hear and come back and forcibly remove his feet from her desk, which he was setting down on the floor that very second. “I’ve seen nicer man-eating tigers.”  
  
Who would have believed Letty would take being management seriously? It was right up there with him being management material or a sucker for old ladies. Despite the break-ups and the final moratorium of the Dom-Letty saga, it was obvious that Dom trusted Letty, valued her skills as mechanic and a driver, and she, in turn, valued her job. When Dom said he wanted them in on this plan, he’d meant it. Each of them had a place or even two in the various parts of DTs garages, parts yard, and the Body and Soul web-show, podcast thing that Jesse coordinated.  
  
Said show might have even given Letty a cult following on the street scene. Some of her fans, as Leon and Vince dubbed them, could be a bit overzealous in the presence of their one true motor queen. That was why Vince couldn’t actually fault Letty for almost flattening (allegedly) that rich asshole with the lift. Some dudes could not take a hint, and Letty had never been known for being subtle. DT’s was a garage, a respectable one, not a skin bin where some Richie Rich douche nozzle could get his rocks off by hitting on the management because she quirked his kinks.  
  
Dom had been pissed, the type of angry that was stacked in layers, ranging from slightly disturbed to volcanic explosion. The bottom layer was anchored down by the possibility of a law suit, while the successive peaks revolved around the unforgiveable sin of screwing with Dom’s family. The whole situation had bumped Dom to a new level of aggro; one so high, he’d turned a weird shade of red, not quite stroke-out red like he did that one time in Vegas during the morning after they’d discovered the tattoos they decided never to talk about, which back then had been a scary match to Kool-Aid red, but freakishly scary vein throbbing across the forehead red.  
  
Through the collective might of pulled strings, a few phone calls, some whispered threats undoubtedly, things had worked out—no charges or lawyers churning the waters like sharks hungry for chum, just Let in anger management and Richie Rich learning the difference between a good touch and a bad touch through a one-on-one demonstration courtesy of Dom, Vince and Leon and a dark alley.  
  
It was safe to say that Vince loved his job.  
  
                                                                                                                           **  
  
Later that night after the place was picked up, the doors locked and the sign flipped for the day, though Vince wavered about changing the return sign to Tuesday, they pulled out of the lot for the night. Vince followed the white arcs of Letty’s taillights, which were almost hypnotic in their beauty. His mind wandered lazily back to the prospect of dinner. The threat of Mia cooking was pushed aside for the prospect that she was planning to celebrate or impress someone. The possibility of either would have been news to him.  
  
Unsettling was the right description of the feeling he got when he realized that he’d managed to transition into being a responsible adult. The fact that they no longer worked together side by side as they had in the old days of Big D’s shop had been the major catalyst for him getting his life together. They’d all become adults by piggybacking on Dom’s determination to scrape funds together to get DT’s back into shape. Back then, Dom had dove back into the street scene with the goal set in stone: get enough to get out and move on and he had. Now they rotated from place to place, depending on the project, and became the gatekeepers for little hoppers with a roll or two of crumpled bills, big dreams and stars in their eyes.  
  
He pushed aside thoughts of old dog fights and scraping to get by. As Vince thought more about dinner, he came to realize that he hadn’t seen Dom in a good while. It seemed that since Dom had returned from his trip to Vegas, their paths intersected less than normal. And if they did, well, Dom’s attention was most notably on his phone, texting, talking or waiting for his phone to ring.  
  
Vegas represented two sides of the same fucked up coin in Vince’s estimation. In Vegas, he’d won races, gotten laid in ways that he would long to share the details shamelessly with his and Mia’s grandchildren—fingers crossed on that one; won a little money; had his own Hangerover-esque adventure with Dom, the proof of which was nestled inside the jungle of ink of his inner bicep while Dom’s was on his right hip.  
  
Independent research on Vince’s part, which amounted to watching a whole season of a kids cartoon on Jesse’s laptop, told him his tattoo was a rendition of the fiercest little pony to ever gallop through Equaria—Rainbow Dash and Dom’s was of Apple Jack. Why two grown men would get tattoos of ponies from a kids show? Because even plastered beyond rational thought, they realized the message at the heart of the show was friendship, and he and Dom would be friends from cradle to death, even if no one would ever know about the ponies that bonded them. Ponies and friendship sealed the deal on their lifetime of brohood.  
  
On the flip side, in Vegas, he’d lost a bit on money at the tables, gotten his ass handed to him by Detroit muscle running gravel twisting hemis, and almost ended up a resident of Clark County rather than an annoying guest. All because he acted like a Viking on a rampage after too many shots of Jagger and a hit or two of Absinthe, despite not remembering where they’d dug that up. There was also that one other _thing_ : almost losing his arm and getting shot had a way of souring the place for him.  
  
Since the accident, there had been a few car shows and races Dom had needed to go to and Vince likewise wanted to check out, but there’d been too much to leave behind so he’d stayed. Anytime, he’d thought of Vegas though, he’d felt a small roiling of his stomach that he couldn’t blame on Mia’s cooking.  
  
That reluctant feeling was coupled with each spastic involuntary twitch of his scarred arm. The scars coiled up his arm in thick white vines of keloided flesh. The scars blended into the inked mosaic of vibrant tats, chronicling his life and history in all shades of Roy G. BIV. The curling white vine fit nicely there with a quiet irony, like tree branches reaching towards the sun, expanding and spanning out and inward and cutting through, blazing new paths connecting all that had been before illuminating what was to come.  
  
The accident had been his Lompoc, his period of forced reflection and the quagmire that he had to wade through to finally get his life in order, or so he believed. Like gravity, the accident had brought him crashing down hard to a reality that had been staring him in the face—one where Dom was leading him, even I he was following so far back, he might have been stuck on the horizon’s shadow, to something better.  
  
This was what Dom had been getting at with this big brand new plan of his, because the road wasn’t always endless; every race wasn’t certain to be won, and walking away could sometimes be the best option he could hope for.  
  
It had been his mouth that had gotten him into trouble again. First, he’d been caught poaching on someone else’s territory and wouldn’t back off. Then, Mia had been making eyes at some blond surfer type that had been following Dom around with the same tenacity as a hyperactive puppy nipping at its masters’ heels. So he’d been ticked off and itching to do something reckless.  
  
Secondly, he’d taken a challenge that involved high stakes aerobics and precision driving. His mission of the utmost macho importance involved being harnessed to the cab of a semi, jumping off the cab and onto his partner’s car, scrambling inside as soon as he could before crossing the finish line. How was he supposed to know that his opponent wouldn’t play fair and would purposely tamper with his harness so that it would be easier to take a shot at him?  
  
That was one memory that Vince couldn’t entirely smooth out. He remembered the searing pain of being shot in the side and the burning pressure of the harness winding over his arm. The space between losing his balance on the running board and ending up head first inside of the passenger’s seat of Leon’s Civic were all a mystery. Out there, he wasn’t sure where, lived the person responsible for getting his ass off that truck. One day, he would find them and thank them properly.  
  
After the incident in Vegas, there was a fuck ton of pain and suffering; his arm locked up worse than arthritis in an eighty year old musician’s fingers, and it jumped to the beat of its own silent tweaked out rhythm at the best and of worst times. Nine months of stuttering, wholly misery making physical therapy followed. In the interim, he went through physical therapists faster than water through a sieve.  
  
His last physical therapist, a cool cat from the heart of Watts, with no patience for dealing with Vince’s troll under a bridge routine used a hodge-podge of positive and negative reinforcement to get him better.  
  
Negative behavior got him his ass handed to him verbally and embarrassed in front of Mia, who would always drop by for his sessions on his worst days. Ultimately, those were always the days where he acted like he’d taken a tumble on the evolutionary scale to a life form noted for crawling on its belly and huffing smoke from its nostrils, such as dickasaurus rex.  
  
Good days got him introduced to the one thing better in life than cold beer, Dom’s barbeque, and kicking ass: chicken and waffles. It was an oddly satisfying combination of sweet and crunchy that had almost rivaled getting laid and winning in life in terms of satisfaction.  
  
Vince could say two things for positive reinforcement: it didn’t get him clowned and got him a new spot he where could just hang out. He’d even brought the team out on his better days once or twice until Letty and Leon reminded him of the misfortune that was middle age spread and the unforgettable paunch his dad had before he took off. After than Jo--Jo’s Shack of Wings N’ Things became his private getaway, no outside visitors welcome.  
  
His mind wandering had put a nice bit of distance between his car and Letty’s. She’d love that obviously. Suspicion aside, he was looking forward to dinner. If anything, it gave him time to catch up with the small handful of people in the world that he really gave a damn about, Dom particularly.  
  
Pimping DT’s was a 24/7 job, which had him moving from place to place so quickly the Flash would get jealous. For someone who wasn’t normally a big talker, Dom’s phone had been keeping him occupied more and more recently. All business stuff, Vince would’ve presumed, had it not been for a name being dropped into conversation.  
  
 _Bri._  
  
Probably not a stripper on the strip, because Dom didn’t roll like that and dating a stripper meant others were getting a small piece of the good times normally promised after hours. But whoever _Bri_ was had Dom attached to his phone as if each call was adding a couple of green stacks to his personal treasury. The look on Dom’s face on those rare occasions as of late when Vince had seen him gave him away. _Bri_ had earned a passing thought or two from Vince, who’d seen the full force grins that had taken up residence on Dom’s face. It was a different look—a better look than his normal cool, business owning roughneck persona. Dom seemed…happy.  
  
Knowing Dom made forming a mental picture of Bri difficult. See, make and model didn’t matter much to D. He’d dated chicks across the rainbow spectrum. The one underlining characteristic was that each was as beautiful on the outside as she was fierce on the inside, and of course, possessed gorgeous eyes and a pretty smile.  
  
She’d probably fall somewhere between Giselle and Letty on the spectrum of Dom’s ex-girlfriends, meaning she’d probably be insanely hot, along with the highly likelihood that she would be equal buckets of crazy to complement her insane looks and ability in a car. Well, at least, Vince could be certain that Dom’s newest fling would keep things interesting, if Dom ever stopped hogging her. Unless she was the second coming of Shelly Oliver, who was as pretty as picture from far away, but up close was puzzlingly cockeyed. Her eyes were harder than a rubix cube to figure out. She also had a laugh like a backed up exhaust pipe. If that was the case, Vince could see why Dom would want to keep her under wraps or a paper bag.  
  
Yep, Letty would have definitely punched him for that one.  
  
As he rolled up the block, he saw that the usual suspects were already present. Leon’s Civic was parked ahead of Jesse’s Jetta, while Letty had pulled in behind Mia and had hopped out, standing with her arms crossed and sunglasses perched on the tip of her nose, waiting impatiently for Vince to park already. Normally, Vince pulled in behind Dom’s Mazda, but the RX-7 was on rest now that Dom had finally found the courage to drive the Charger again. In Vince’s space sat a Skyline so sick, it made his heart beat a little faster, and the silver and blue splashed on the chassis found him equal parts curious and feeling dangerously close to being in love.  
  
Whatever, he ‘d make sure the buster in question was out of way before the end of the night and all would be right in the world once more.  
  
Rome waved his fork with the finesse of a wizard’s wand in front of Vince’s eyes. A simple flick of the wrist was all it took to bring Vince back to the here and now. “Done taking your mental siesta?” He asked sharply, “--or do I need to give you extra time for some extended deep thinking?”  
  
Vince pulled a sour face. “Naw, I’m done.” He looked at his former plate longingly, pointedly avoiding Rome’s hawkeye gaze as he went. “I didn’t think you were on the clock, Dr. Phil,” he said sarcastically.  
  
“Dr. Phil? Really, man, Montel Williams I get, but Dr. Phil though? It’s like you’re not even trying? Anyway, you mind sharing with the rest of the class, because you’re sitting over there like a squirrel holding on to the very last nut before winter.”  
  
Slouching low on the bench, Vince cast his eyes about lazily before replying. “Well, what do you want me to say?” Because Vince had never been a sterling conversationalist and yakking it up with Pearce for shits and giggles was only something he’d do for fun in Bizzaro World.  
  
“How about for starters you owning up to being a giant dick to my boy.” Rome’s eyes, dark and smoldering, cut through his layers of overblown theatrics to speak a truth that even Vince could understand. He was backing his friend and Vince respected that, not that he would actually say as much aloud.  
  
“ _Dick_...right?” And Vince rolled his eyes, easily sidestepping Rome’s request.  
  
If Pearce had grievances, then so did Vince. At least, Vince figured, his issues were legit. No one else could claim that Optimus Blond had screwed up their lives worse than Vince’s. All true—case in point, being exiled to Jo-Jo’s with Roman Pearce as his warden or annoying as hell babysitter.  
  
Alright, he’d bite, and so started in a rough whisper. “Ok, so, how am I supposed to deal with your boy being on Dom like white on rice? ...C’mon, I just met him, like, three weeks ago and now they’re up and moving in together and possibly getting big fat gay--” he whispered “--married. Dom likes to move fast, but, damn. Snowflake has him moving at warp speed, and I’m feelin’ like the only person wondering what’s the rush.”  
  
If Bri was a chick, he’d swear she was trying to put a ring on it because there was a DT part III on the way. The thought gave Vince pause. Suddenly, A connected to B, which connected to C and whole knotted string of crazy.  
  
He looked to Rome speculatively and let his thought roll around like a lose Powerball number, while Rome eyed him as though he was waiting for Vince to lose his ever-loving mind. And the subtle tightening of the corners of Rome’s eyes declared Vince to be seconds away from full insanity lift-off.  
  
The brutally caustic mental voice of his conscience, e.g. Letty, warned him that he was about to step into a minefield, but Vince brushed her off and decided to go for all or nothing. “I’ll give you that Blond--Brian is um…um…very pretty for a dude--” Vince had eyes and even a blind man could see Irish Cream could tempt or bring a normal straight dude—see Dom—to the point of considering a little urban jungle Brokeback action.  
  
What?  
  
Vince knew the movie because he watched it accidentally on purpose for research purposes, which were now strangely relevant. Though he still wanted to know what the hell happened in that damn tent. “Are you sure….” He trailed off, squinting in Rome’s direction.  
  
Escalating in volume and pitch, Rome asked, “Sure about what?”  
  
“Are you sure that the _Bri_ is actually … you know? Like one hundred percent dude and not, like, a very butch, flat-chested, short-haired, broad shouldered woman?” Because he’d seen some chicks down at the Kit Kat Lounge, who were almost as butch as him, so in all rights it was a fair question.  
  
Rome’s mouth partially closed and opened, flapped, and closed again with a tight snap. He inspected Vince with the scrutiny of one foreign language speaker to another. From the look on Rome’s face, Vince was speaking Chinese while Rome only understood Russian. Well, _tough-ski shit-ski_ , the meaning of his question wouldn’t be lost in damn translation.  
  
Rome scrubbed his hand over his face, huffing out an overwrought sigh as his fingers slipped to rest under his chin, giving him a look of a compassionate yet overwhelmed sounding board.  
  
“Man, are you _high_? You can tell me if you are and I won’t get mad. Would explain a lot actually,” Rome said critically, diligently staring Vince down as he deciphered all the possible ways that Vince could have ended up intoxicated behind his back. “Did someone slip crack in your waffles?” Rome had heard all sorts of crazy stories about L.A., so he didn’t doubt the plausibility of the cute little waitress with the rows of piercings drugging them to the gills. He looked dubiously down at the plate set before him and itched to push it aside.  
  
Now that Vince had been resupplied with a refilled plate of chicken and waffles, he felt a bit…mellow and willing to get everything off his chest, and since Rome was already here, attention piqued and firing off questions, it was his job or responsibility to wade through the waters of Vince’s latent crazy.  
  
“Hey, I’m asking all the questions I can think of, because this thing makes no goddamn sense. None…So what’s the answer? Cuz nothing’s adding up yet.” One plus one equaled two. Dom plus Count White Chocula equaled Vince’s brain misfiring.  
  
Rome’s expression clearly telegraphed that he thought Vince was a fool. The look was so potent Vince could almost feel the ink of a rubber stamp branding his forehead with the word _dumbass_ across it.  
  
“If I’m understanding correctly the river of cray-cray that’s coming out of your mouth right now, then I’m guessing that the answers you’re looking for are: no, Bri isn’t the manliest woman in existence and no,” Rome looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head in disbelief that he was even entertaining this fool’s crazy, “he’s not carrying Dom’s bald muscle baby, even if that does sound like a code name for Dom’s di--”  
  
“Hey!” Vince growled. “I’m eating here.”  
  
“Me too, but do you see me actin’ a fool like the fool sitting across from me?” Meaning him, which Vince gathered two seconds later.  
  
“Watch it, Motor Mouth,” Vince warned. “When I get pissed, I get stabby.” A butter-knife would do the same job as a fork with enough force applied behind it.  
  
“Whatever,” Rome replied sullenly. He signaled the waitress with a wave of his hand. He planned to get the most of his six ninety-five, and ordered up another plate of the house special. “Well, start talking, bruh, so I don’t have to, and then we’ll call it even.” His fingers were curled tightly around the thin metal spine of his fork and waved it about for emphasis.  
  
This was the golden opportunity Vince’d been searching for since the bomb dropped three weeks ago, and Vincent wouldn’t let the moment pass without milking Pearce for all the intel he had.  
  
“Alright, I have a question. A legit one,” Vince clarified, leaning across the table in order to temper his voice and keep this conversation strictly between them. “Are you actually okay with this? With your boy and my boy--”he ad-libbed hooking up with twining fingers, circling together in a messy jumble.  
  
He waited while watching Rome weigh his question. From all that Vince had seen of Roman Pearce in the previous week, he hadn’t taken Rome for being much of a deep thinker. If circumstances were different, they might’ve been friends because short fuses always worked so well with easily struck matches.  
  
Finally, Rome shrugged vaguely before angling his gaze towards the large shoe polish covered window off to his right and the parking lot beyond the glass. “I try not to think about Brian and his, um, dudes,” he said, shaking his head, “because I’m too pretty to be scarred for life.”  
  
Good answer. In fact, Vince almost laughed.  
  
Rome turned back to face Vince, his expression still moderately defensive yet far more honest than before. “As long as I’ve known Bri, he’s been a puzzle. The only thing I can predict about him is that he’s always unpredictable, so I’ve just gotten used to it.”  
  
A small grin crossed his face at just the right moment as the waitress returned then with Rome’s order and a reciprocated smile of her own. Once Rome made the requisite gestures to show that he was interested and she was out of earshot, he continued to speak his piece.  
  
“You asked how I deal with it? Short answer is--I don’t, I’ve realized it just is. Bri’s my bro, my family. He’d give anything for me if I needed it, and it goes the same way for me, so I just accept what just is.”  
  
Rome paused, thoughtfully. “What I know is: people like Brian and he likes them, and if I’d really think about it, then I should be jealous cuz he’s getting twice as much play than I’ll ever get and his game is totally weak--makes this all the more unfair. And if this hadn’t been anything special, he would have let my ass remain in Miami. Wouldn’t have ridden my ass like tweaked out jockey to make the trip out here.”  
  
There was a lot of truth in what Rome had said, but a part of Vince wanted another reason--anything else-- to explain what was happening. He was even willing to conjure up memories of his Nana’s stories from the old country—don’t ask him which old country—and believe in a darker cause for Brian entering Dom’s life and flipping his sexuality with more dexterity than a teenage Russian gymnast.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conversation continues, Vince gets _ideas_ , and Rome has the patience of a saint.

His Nana used to tell him, in the rare moments when he had her all to himself, stories of demons and spirits, most of which were prone to eating bad children. It seemed monsters always liked the taste of bad children and more often than not, he and his brood of cousins put gremlins to shame with their wickedness. One story, in particular, stood out like a pop-up in a storybook.  
  
“Succubus,” he garbled around his mouthful of half a waffle. In a weird way, Malibu Ken being a succubus would explain everything--literally everything, and Vince wouldn’t have to spare a moment longer pondering questions that he really didn’t want to distill into some bead of truth.  
  
Rome looked outraged. “What did you say?” His body was torqued up tighter than a stretched spring ready to recoil. “I know you don’t like them being together, but there’s no reason to be all homophobic and shit.”  
  
“I didn’t say anything homo-whatever. I said ‘Succubus’.”  
  
“Suck-you-what now?” Rome yelled, interrupting the flow of diner chatter.  
  
“Nevermind.”  
  
Rome relaxed marginally, though the slow curling of his hands into loose fists demonstrated his desire to introduce Vince to Fast Freddie and the Furious Five. Whoever said slapping was unmanly had never done it correctly in his opinion.  
  
Vince shook his head, remembering old, hard-learned lessons. Dom’s Vegas love connection was enough. All but stating _that_ was why they shouldn’t go places alone, because friends who let friends go to Vegas alone, ended up ordering mail order brides who were actually male and bringing them home.  
  
Almost offhandedly, Rome started, “You realize when I say they’ve been hooking up for a good minute that that actually means, like, fifteen months or something now.”He looked contemplative, scrolling through his mental calendar to verify the details before delivering the news. “Yeah, Brian told me… maybe six months ago about all this.”  
  
Facts?  
  
Check.  
  
Source?  
  
Check.  
  
Roman Pearce wormed his way to being Vince’s new source for responsible gossip.  
  
But one startling piece of information was confirmed: Vince had been left in the dark.  
  
Vince thought back to fifteen months ago, which put them right at Race Wars, right around the time of his accident, and suddenly he felt the earth shift beneath his feet and the feeling had little to do with the San Andreas. That blond surfer puppy dog he’d been pissed about hadn’t gone away after all.  
  
“Since Race Wars,” he dropped nonchalantly, forking lazily through the shredded mass of syrup saturated waffle on his plate. His mind was clearly elsewhere, morosely wondering when Dom had stopped telling him things.  
  
Suddenly, Vince was angry—canker sore in the middle of winter angry, when he let his anger bubble to the surface, he got flippant at the mouth and ready for a fight. Squaring off with Pearce would be a nice little warm-up later, but it wasn’t Pearce that he really wanted to sock into next week. It was really Brian “Part-Time Porn Star” O’Conner that set Vince’s teeth on edge.  
  
What happened to bros before hoes?  
  
Being honest with himself, Vince wasn’t too upset about Dom hooking up with another dude thing. Having known D all his life, Dom could grow a beard, dye it white and paint himself blue and call himself the second coming of Papa Smurf and Vince would still be cool with it. Vince wouldn’t understand Dom’s turn for the weird, but he’d support it because Dom was his bro.  
  
But this?  
  
Why this dude?  
  
Goldilocks and Dom had nothing in common, except a love of cars and apparently banging each other.  
  
“That’s right, since Race Wars, bruh.”Rome made a big production of pushing away plate number two while deliberately patting his still impossibly flat stomach. “I don’t get why everyone’s playing hide the landmine with you. Most people who have their lives saved from certain death tend to act, you know, grateful? But you, I guess you were one of those hard cases in school—didn’t listen and comprehend too well, now did you?”  
  
Vince’s eyes darted away from Rome, only to catch those of the sweet old lady with her church friends. Her slight nod and knowing smile was the cold bucket of water he needed to drop him from an eight to a three on the throwdown scale.  
  
This had to be some sort of karmic test or a universal joke to not only make the dude stealing his best friend, but have same pain the ass end up being the same dude who saved Vince’s life, like Rome said from certain death.  
  
The universe must hate him.  
  
Really hate him.  
  
But he could be grateful—hell, he was more than grateful to not be dead or fucked up beyond all recognition. With a longsuffering sigh, Vince came to the hard-won conclusion that he could possibly ease up on being such a dick to Swiss Miss, even if his gut screamed that it wasn’t the right thing to do; he knew Dom wouldn’t be pissed at him anymore if he were actually playing nice.  
  
Vince wrapped a protective arm around his plate after catching sight of Rome’s increasingly covetous looks being tossed his way. He snapped his fingers in the air. “Now I feel like a bigger dick for not getting him a fruit basket.” Yeah, another dick move that Letty would totally smack him for, but if it saved his remaining chicken and waffles from Rome’s side of the table then he’d gladly repent later after Rome got his thirds, fourths, or whatever.  
  
“You definitely should.” Rome began a quick count with his fingers, ticking off all the acceptable forms of gratitude in his book. “Cash is good. Cash is always _good_.” Rome smiled cheekily, before resuming his list. “Fruit baskets…cookie baskets…Candy baskets…”  
  
“I get it, you like baskets,” Vince huffed, annoyed, which faded to relief when the waitress appeared again with another plate to slip in front of Rome’s hungry gaze. A folded napkin landed beside his plate and her fingers lingered over it with the intention of drawing his eyes to the surprise inside. The waitress, “Tatiana”, her nametag read, flashed Vince a grin before walking off to her other tables. Her uniform swayed hard in the back, sliding across the round curve of her high and tight backside that clearly made Vince jealous to not be on the receiving end of her phone number.  
  
Rome’s smile spoke of sweet satisfaction, but the momentary silence that Vince had reveled in was far too short lived. “--gift certificates, car stuff, new playstation games…Doesn’t matter what you give as long as you don’t take a page out of your boy’s book.”  
  
Vince’s face must have betrayed how clueless he was, so Rome continued, shaking his head once again as he delivered another piece of the story. “So, look, Bri and Big D met before Race Wars, right? And they raced and somehow your homeboy pulled out the win--”  
  
A swell of pride filled Vince’s face. In the face of so many changes, it was refreshing to see one thing that stayed the same. “That’s because Dom never loses.” To have seen Blondie watch Dom’s taillights would have been sweeter than Jo-Jo’s signature syrup or any dinner without Mia’s _cooking_.  
  
Not impressed, Rome drawled, “ _Right_. Anyway, I got all this from Brian when he was three sheets into the wind after finally fessing up that he was coming back out here for good this time.”  
  
“Ain’t that nice.”  
  
Rome’s face clearly broadcasted that he’d like to pour Vince a tall glass of _shut the hell up_ juice; of which sadly, Jo-Jo’s was all out of at the moment.  
  
“He’s not the most talkative person I know.” Ironic, since Rome’s mouth could put the Maxima’s engine to shame in the motoring department. “--Brian wasn’t too generous with the details—thank god, but I know he ended up doing Dom a solid and they became friends. After Bri pulled a Spiderman trick by saving your dumbass from that truck, then he and Dom became _friends_ ,” Rome delivered with a raised eyebrow.  
  
Vince chewed slowly, very slowly to keep himself centered and composed.  
  
“Since then, they’ve been following each other around like giant lost puppies—callin’, textin’, chattin’-- I swear on my rims and all my chrome, I heard Brian giggling once and almost damn curling his fingers through his hair like a thirteen year old girl staring at a Justin Bieber poster. I was traumatized….I won’t even go into all the times I’ve walked onto Bri’s boat and found Dom just sitting there looking like the bald skipper heading to Gilligan’s Island.”  
  
They were back to where they started. Months and months had passed where Vince had been left out of the loop. Did everyone else know? Not even the gloriousness of the endless chicken and waffles would get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth.  
  
Sure, he’d misread the situation at dinner three weeks ago. As soon as he’d heard Brad Pitt-ney Spears tell Mia that he really liked her tuna, he’d been ready to jump his chain like any good junkyard dog. Because no one like Mia’s tuna and any new dude saying that he did was only after one thing. He’d been surprised that Dom had only smiled rather than given Tiger Beat his signature look that implied eating concrete was somewhere in the interested guy’s future.  
  
No, Blondie didn’t get _that_ look. He got a whole batch of friendlier ones, the kind that came from fake flirting with Mia and really flirting with Dom instead.  
  
Vince was like a dog with a stripped bare bone; he’d gnaw on it until there was nothing left and still keep going. Similarly, he remained transfixed by this mystery and what he had failed to see. Vince was sure there had to be a reason for him being kept in the dark.  
  
As it was, he was giving Dom enough time to cool down before slinking back to the house with a short apology ready to go and a case of Corona because that was the only way he’d see himself really prying Dom open without feeling like he was wading through the drama of Lifetime movie. Letty and Mia might have said a billion and half things, all towards the negative aspects of said Lifetime movies, but Vince always felt better after watching them. Why? Because the chicks always overcame the odds and got away after kicking some ass. And who didn’t like a good ass-kicking?  
  
Rome’s big hand swam through Vince’s field of vision, forcing him to reel back sharply. He scowled, his dark brows arched into convergent hugging points. “Cut that out,” Vince growled.  
  
“You need to stop checking out like that before someone thinks you’ve wandered off from your home, Old Man.” To keep Vince from saying anything or possibly snapping at his fingers, Rome held a palm up just out of the reach and kept Vince forcibly silent. “Did you ever figure there was a reason why they were keeping you in dark? Because it looks to me like they knew you were going to flip the fuck out. Just saying.”  
  
Rome commandeered the syrup, pouring it quite liberally over his plate. It was surprising that he possessed such a Crest-white grin, given that he’d just slathered about a third of the bottle over his food. “I’ll give you a minute to take another mental siesta. To be fair, I’ll eat my plate, order you another one, I’ll even promise not to eat that one. So what do you say? Maybe, you’ll finally figure this thing out before all the barbeques gone or I’m old as dirt or D and B adopt a whole tribe of children like Brad and Angelina.” He gestured with his fork once more, “Yep, Bri’s totally Angelina in this equation, cuz she’s totally hot but carries a boatload of crazy in the eyes, and,” he added after a pause, “if you stare into the blue long enough, you’ll see that Bri does too.”  
  
Sounded right about Dom’s type after all.

* * *

  
  
 _Three Weeks Earlier_  
  
When the door swung open, Vince ran face first into an invisible wall of sound and delicious smells. Up ahead off the landing of the little entry way, Jesse and Leon were dug in deep on the couch, battling it out in a game of Madden on the PlayStation. He could’ve cursed. In fact, he did curse.  
  
Vince slipped behind the back of the couch, sliding in between the two of them and dropped his head and arms to dangle between the button clicking and grunting pair. “Hey, you two gonna be at this all night?”  
  
Leon flicked his eyes to Vince and quickly back to the screen, because Jesse was a ferocious beast in all things game-related, and looking away would give him just enough ground to use a few shifty cheat codes to gang-tackle Leon’s best running back. “If you feel like losing, take a seat, man. Cuz after I serve this up--” on the screen, Leon’s player stutter-stepped, twisted, reversed and plowed ahead to the end zone, “Woo-hah! That’s it. I’m the man. I’m the man. Now if you wanna get schooled too, get ready to go.”  
  
Vince looked from the screen to Jesse to Leon, still in a state of genuine disbelief. Jesse threw his head back against the couch in shock. It was almost a running joke now that no one could beat Jesse on the PS3. Vince guessed all that time spent digging through the internet like a mutant squirrel gave him bionic quick fingers.  
  
It was obvious by the look on Jesse’s face that he’d be stunned for a while yet.  
  
“I…can’t…believe…I…lost.”  
  
“Believe it, kid.” Leon reset the game. “V, man , you sure you want some of this? I’ll tell you honestly, I’m feeling like a bad man right now, and I guarantee butt kickings from here on out.”  
  
Jesse dropped the controller on his lap. “I wouldn’t go making promises you obviously can’t keep.” Jesse fluttered his long spindly fingers inches away from Vince’s nose and Leon’s ear. “You see this?” Jesse’s too skinny, pale fingers curled into jointed hooks capped with dirty fingernails too close to Vince’s face. Wiggling his digits, he said, “Finger cramps made me lose, and Leon’s just lucky that I did.”  
  
Leon batted Jesse’s hand away playfully. “Whatever, Jess. Keep cryin’ me a river and all that cuz your tears are delicious, but I’d really like to get back to the schoolin’ you before I’m old and grey and Vince has a pot gut and a bald spot.”  
  
Vince recoiled disgustedly. “What the hell? Below the belt, Lee.” He smacked Leon upside the back of the head; he was all for sharing the wealth these days but skittered away before Leon could swat him back.  
  
Despite the roar of the crowd in Madden’s opening sequence, Vince could hear the low murmur of Letty and Mia talking in the kitchen. He figured he’d been shooting the shit long enough and decided to head to the back.  
  
With a sidelong glance, Jesse caught him undoing the buttons to his work shirt. His snickering was unfortunately timed in the wake of Leon’s swarming defense coming at his guys on screen.  
  
If Vince thought his _thing_ —affection, crush, or whatever anyone wanted to call it without making him look like a stuttering teenybopper-- for Mia was a secret, then it was obviously the world’s worst kept secret; one that Jesse, Leon and Letty gave him crap for whenever possible.  
  
His work-shirt, creased and damp with the lingering smell of a hard day’s work, landed on Jesse’s head just as Vince intended. The barely dry armpit of the shirt coming to rest on Jesse’s eyes gave him a little extra swagger to put in his step as he headed off to the kitchen.  
  
Jesse dropped his remote, hissing and sputtering like a drowning cat. “Nasty…that’s just so freaking nasty.”  
  
“What can he say?” Leon piped up, as he used the distraction to cheat again. “The man plays dirty.”  
  
Jesse flung the dirty shirt across the room and immediately resumed his wavering offensive on the digital football field. “When I grow up I want be just like you,” he howled at Vince’s back.  
  
Vince snorted, shaking his head before replying sarcastically, “That requires growing up first…You’ll get there. Eventually.”  
  
Not to be outdone, Jesse yelled back, “Like you?”  
  
Vince figured he’d shot the shit long enough and waved off Jesse’s comment. Drawing closer to the kitchen, Vince was once again captured by the scent. It smelled good. With all signs pointing to hopefully edible, he could only pray that his nose didn’t lie and the rumor of Mia cooking was just that—a vicious, terrible rumor.  
  
As he stomped through the old dining room, he saw a stack of Mia’s old accounting books perched on the corner of the table. Those books reminded him of another thing he would take to his grave, which was the sort of weak kneed and fizzy stomach he got whenever Mia started talking numbers.  
  
Mia was truly the perfect woman, no debate needed. She knew cars-- knew how they worked, appreciated them too--but when she stepped up to the plate, becoming ‘Ms. Responsible, take-no-shit, what-do-you-mean-you-didn’t-read-the-fine-print business lady’ all he wanted to do was drop to his knees and propose. Vince came close once. Let’s just say that he’d never been more excited about anyone saving twenty percent on property insurance in his life. That secret was locked so far down; it was currently drinking tea in China and talking drifting in Japan.

 

 

As he entered the kitchen, Letty was on her way out, and she deliberately knocked one of her pointy shoulders into his ribs. She slid her signature black shades off her nose to rest in her hair and inclined her head in the direction of waiting temptation. “Looks like we’re in the clear,” she said not too loudly.

“Thank God,” Vince blurted, relieved. He considered the fact that they would all be working the next day a Magic Mountain-sized barrel of relief.

“Amen to that,” she snickered as she moved to pass him. She stopped once she’d crossed the threshold to the dining room and wrapped her freakishly tight grip around his bicep—the good one of course, and looked him dead in the eye. “Oh, yeah, and.be.nice,” she ordered in a low voice, like a pissed mother in the middle of Sunday Mass.

Letty flicked her eyes in Mia’s direction, and Vince craned his head around the monstrous old icebox that Dom refused to replace because it had character and noticed suddenly that Mia was talking to someone else. Someone male, who sounded nothing like Dom.

Automatically, he replied tightly, “I’m always nice.”

Letty’s smirk was a mixed bag of sharp angles and not so secret judgment. She let him go, pounded his chest lightly and stalked back into the living room, loudly proclaiming that she had dibs on playing the winner and demanding Halo in the next round.

So he was rooted to the kitchen floor like some sort of big, dumb-looking tatted up tree. Sue him. Because there was some blond dude, not Hollywood blond, legit natural Swiss Miss born this way blond dude mugging it up in the kitchen with Mia. Maybe it was shock that kept him glued in place, silent and watching like a bug-eyed child mesmerized by a National Geographic special on the wilds of the Savanna.

It was decided upon seeing Blondie smile at Mia and Mia smile one of her gorgeous grins in return that Blondie was a persona non grata. He watched the pair with the eyes of an eagle or the eyes of a jealous wannabe boyfriend. Mia handed over an aluminum foil covered tin pan and pushed him out the backdoor and into the waiting smoking range of Dom’s king size grill.

“Who was that?” He asked in a steely voice and opened the fridge to snag a Corona.

Mia gave him a beautifully indulgent smile on the heels of a mild chewing out. “Hello, Vince. How are you? Can I figure out what’s got you twisted up like an old gym sock?” She steamrolled right over his attempt to show a bit of righteous male indignation. Damn, this woman was amazing.

He twisted the top of the cold bottle. “Hey,” he muttered and took a stiff pull from the bottle, because there was nothing like cold beer to go with simmering jealousy and being cowed thoroughly.

Not to let Vince’s priggishness spoil the moment, Mia wiped her hands on a dishtowel and regarded him with a soft smile. She dropped the towel, which made a wet smack in the sink, and made her way over to him and wrapped him up in a firm hug. “Hey back ya.”

Her hands were always gentle whenever they touched his arm; this time they were no different. She assessed him with her sharp brown eyes that always had a way of seeing right through him without even trying. “And that’s Brian, by the way,” she declared, as if it was ridiculous that Vince even had to ask.

So Blondie had a name? Yeah, Mia was a fully grown woman, a very well-rounded one at that, but Dom couldn’t be cool with his sister hanging out with Mr. Brad Pitt-ney Spears.

Vince’s gut was always right, and as he looked out of the window in the kitchen down at the backyard where Dom and the Buster were chitchatting like the old chicks on the View.

And Dom was steadily giving this interloper the kind of smile that came out after a few too many beers and no memories of the bad things before, and that smile was so contagious. Brian easily caught it, returned it, and matched Dom second for second in their bonding time by the grill.

Watching D and Blond Boy Barbie chill with such apparent ease reminded Vince of all the time that had passed since him and Dom had legitimately talked, and it hadn’t been this easy since before the accident.

Suddenly, that fear that he hadn’t quite been able to articulate from the time he was eight until Dom went to jail came roaring back. There was something that he couldn’t easily identify between Dom and Brian. If for a second he believed himself to be imagining all of this, then he’d blame PT and a good day’s work for tiring him out. But what he was seeing wasn’t caused by any of that. Dom was sociable, not friendly, and there was a big damn difference between the two.

Vince hated having _feelings_ , because they never turned out to result in anything good. This guy would be trouble, of that Vince was absolutely certain. As he watched Dom and Brian from the window, who talked and drank and seemed to be a million miles away, Vince hugged Mia closer, and actually hoped for once that the coyote inside of him was barking up the wrong tree.

His gut said otherwise.

Later on when he dropped over the side of the couch ready to immerse himself in the universe of Halo and guns big enough to take out planets, he asked Leon about the newcomer, and Leon said, “Oh, Brian?” as if once again Vince was the one out of step.

Brian seemed to bob at the edge of his vision for the next forty-five minutes before they were hustled out to the backyard table. But in between his first sighting of the new kid on the block and finally chowing down, Vince managed to only intercept Dom once and ended up accepting a quick one armed hug and a quick shallow inquiry of “You are all right?” before disappearing off to points unknown, where undoubtedly _Brian_ was waiting.

At the table, all the usual suspects took their places. Leon, Jesse, and Letty sat on the left side while Mia and Brian sat on the right. Vince bookended the bottom of the table as Dom headed up the top. Sitting next to Dom, always on his right, had been his place, instinctual positioning for his real right hand man. Like his spot out front, there was another resting in it.

So far dinner had painted a hazy picture of who their dinner guest was—an unwanted guest in Vince’s opinion, but welcomed newcomer to everyone else. He was so laidback, he should’ve been sprawling lazily in wicker lounger like a walking and talking ad for a beach getaway. Brian, who had an actual job that Vince hadn’t quite sussed out yet, still built cars, raced them, and somehow managed to catch Dom’s attention by losing to him. Back in the day, guys who raced Dom and lost were a dime a dozen. Dom must’ve gone soft if a loser had endeared himself to Dom, whose willingness to spread himself around to the less fortunate was almost admirable.

Vince knew he was out and out staring at Justin Timber-Fake, who looked like the poster child of suburbia as he sat in Vince’s spot all cool, calm and collected like his ass was set to grow roots on the bench. As dinner wore on his stare transitioned exponentially from curious to irritated with a side order of unhealthy suspicion.

Vince tried to outwait Brian as the evening wore on, expecting him to make an exit due to the sheer weight of Vince’s mental urging, but the message wasn’t received and Brian lingered, grew more relaxed as dirty empty dishes and empty beer bottles piled up.

The lazy way the buster talked was rolling in Southern California dips and valleys, buoying up and down like an unfettered surf board cresting on choppy tides. Topping off the shitty clothes, around-the-way _swagger_ that carried the subtle roll at the end of a loose ‘a’ rather than the definite ‘er’ painted him as something other than a well off trying too hard white boy. He was still a trying too hard white boy, though a thin veneer of authenticity—easy directness and heightened awareness—undercut Brian’s general sense of vagueness that prevented Vince from getting a good handle on him. That street cred that Vince sniffed out seemed more in line with Sunset Boulevard, where the rest of the hookers strolled and Brian probably did too than any streets near their hood.

Yes, Vince could admit that he was prejudiced. Dude looked like a flesh and blood stand-in for one of those mannequins in Mannequins 3: The Reckoning, except for the swap-meet clothes and busted Chucks and apparently lacking in the bloodlust the drove the mannequins to animate and disassemble their victims.

The soft lights suspended throughout the backyard, holdovers from parties long past made the twilight hour far more comfortable. But Vince found it hard to enjoy the good humor, because those prejudices he mentioned kept creeping up on him with each silent look that passed between Dom and fake JT. Entire conversations were being telegraphed through direct looks and darting glances, and Vince did not like it.

When Brian mentioned he liked Mia’s tuna while they were sitting at the picnic table, Vince wondered if this would be just cause to drive him off. But no, Brian’s admiration for Mia’s tuna was neither sleazy nor ironic. The look Dom bestowed on Brian over his hands, which were still folded after a most appropriate grace, was equal parts admiring because someone actually admitted they liked his sister’s tuna, and incredulous because someone admitted they liked his sister’s cooking.

It was obvious that he was missing something. Frosty joining them for dinner was the obvious indicator that he appeared to be out of sync. The excitement and cosmically luminous spark in Dom’s eyes after Frosty’s announcement that he was relocating from Miami to L.A. hadn’t seemed all that exciting to Vince. But the look of Dom’s face, so openly excited, put Vince’s doubts to rest. He drained three beers that night, but not one helped him to think any clearer.

After having almost lost his arm and being shot, Vince decided that a little more care and preparation were in order to live the rest of his life. His mama and Nana didn’t raise a fool—a combative drunk, a surly bastard, a general believer in being loose, committed and focused behind a wheel, and an eternal devotee to the cult of Mia Toretto—yes, but a fool, not really. There was not enough preparation in the world for what came next.

If Vince wanted a smoking gun, he finally had one after the dinner dishes were cleared and the video games resumed, and it just about exploded in his hands when he watched the unexpected bump and grind, a sexual melee that reminded him once more of Mia’s foray into Greek myths, because he swore he was gradually turning to stone the longer his eyes lingered on the beast with two backs and too many masculine muscles getting in it on inside the shed on top of the Charger.

Dom only mad big productions when it mattered and this somehow failed to qualify on Vince’s list. People kissed every day, but seeing his exclusively so hetero that it hurt best buddy locking lips with the blond prince of darkness, while progressing towards unspeakable crimes of cruel and usual punishment against the flawless black steel chassis of the Charger was not a sight to be forgotten.

To say he was surprised when he caught them kissing inside the shed was an understatement. If anyone said he fainted, they were lying and totally misread the situation—he tripped.

War movies were the best vehicles for describing shock; all senses with the exception of sight were muted by the buzzing silence that filled desolate spaces and made the skin crawl in response to a billion tiny touches that couldn’t be reciprocated. Shock was a picture of Vince frozen in the doorway of the garage.

Each infinitely too long second of that kiss would be forever seared into his memory. In the weak light of the single overhead swaying bulb, Brian’s eyes cut away from Dom’s face and over Dom’s shoulder to discover Vince’s presence. They’d been so blue they’d looked almost feline, preternaturally human. Yet, it was Dom’s expression that continued to bring Vince up short when the memory whirled backwards and replayed itself for the umpteenth time. There was no shock on Dom’s face, unlike Vince’s; Dom sported a deep, frustrated ridge between his brows. There wasn’t a single trace of embarrassment, not even the faintest whiff of shame, just vibrating in aggravation from being disturbed.

* * *

Rome’s finger’s snapped the air in front of Vince’s eyes, drawing him back into the here and now and the calming hum of the restaurant sharp and quickly.

Vince blinked hard, clearing the acute fuzziness that clouded his vision as a result of not blinking for so long. Rome eyed him and worked his way through the contents of his plate, though he almost vibrated with the need to add his additional two cents.

“Montel and Dr. Phil call this the root, and, son, I think we just found it,” He said with an uncanny imitation of Dr. Phil’s lazy Texas twang.

Vince replied with an airy snort and a low shake of his head. “First, you’re mentioning Montel, now you’re rolling out the Dr. Phil. If the next words out of your mouth-- ‘you’re not the father’, I’m walking outta here hella fast and gunning it.”

The insinuation that Vince would stiff Rome with the check had flown completely under the radar, which was just fine with Vince. That was always the perfect trump card for an unwanted guest, who decided digging up things best left forgotten was a suitable pastime.

“Well, looking at the spaced out expression that hijacked your face just now made me realize that you need the Holy Trinity to get you through this… _crisis_ ,” Rome managed with forkful of food on precipice of entering his mouth.

Vince hadn’t spent much time thinking about Pearce until the Dutch Boy brought him to the party. Every bit of information, whether it was nonsense or truth, gave him a little more insight into the secret workings of Mr. Roman “Motor Mouth” Pearce.

“I never took you for the religious type.” Which was true. Not that Rome struck him as a godless heathen, although he had his suspicions of O’Conner falling more into the latter category, which would explain _things_. Rome never struck him as the repent and the redemption sort. Yet, it was possible that this was an example of one of Pearce’s hidden facets.

Stray crumbs resting on the broad slope of Rome’s lower lip were wiped away with a quick sweep on his tongue. Once again, he shook his head slowly and the gesture was imbued with the longsuffering patience that one would give a small child in the middle of a tantrum or a dog chasing its tail. “Who was talking about religion? When I said Holy Trinity, I meant Ricki, Jerry, and Winfrey, as in Oprah, cuz you’re in need of professional help and an ass-whoopin’, and I’m a little too busy to give it to you.”

“Fu--”

“Anyway,” Rome deflected Vince’s partially barked curse. “Have you figured out the error of your ways yet? You ready to say sorry and admit you were a capital ‘D’ dick, so we can return to polite company and get real up close and personal with Ms. Bar B. Que?”

Vince took a second to mull the question over. Being distracted by the apparent endlessness of Rome’s gut would have been an easy way of losing sight of what got him exiled here in the first place. That unrelenting tide of embarrassment from earlier had ebbed away, slowly, painfully slowly; eroding on its way out some of his fervent persistence in blaming O’Connor for all of his ninety-nine problems, though the bitch of it was that the blond at the center really wasn’t one of them.

The weight of his reluctance played with his appetite. He pushed his food around restlessly as he took final stock of his decision. “All signs are pointing to yeah. That what you wanna hear?” Vince said with lingering defensiveness. “ I guess I’m ready to face some _uncomfortable_ truths.”

Rome wasn’t swayed by that answer and tuned himself up to let Vince know just how short of the bar he fell. “You think that’s what _I_ wanna hear?” He shook his head so rapidly; it looked like his shiny dome would fly off his shoulder like a frisbee. “I wanna hear that Halle Berry is gonna give me the time of day or that I’m the sexiest GQ sonuvabitch you’ve ever laid eyes on, but for now—I guess I’ll take this as my consolation prize, since you guess that’s what I wanna hear.”

A slender arm cut across Rome’s body, swapping out one empty plate for a full one. It was the waitress, whose approach had gone entirely unnoticed by Vince. The grin turned the waitress’ way was far too big for Rome’s face, making him look vaguely anime-ish as he mimed a telephone with two fingers that sent the waitress back to work with the faintest trace of blush coloring her honey-toned skin.

Vince gave the new plate a considering glance. How many had it been? Four? Five? Vince was perplexed by the apparent hollow leg Rome had hidden and wouldn’t be too surprised if Rome’s ticker started doing the mambo shuffle in his chest after inhaling too much grease and sugar in one overwhelming sitting.

Cutting his attention to Vince, Rome’s easy smile melted away faster than blue moon snowfall in L.A., so quick it would have made the Flash look like the tortoise. “You guess you have to face the truth.” Rome stippled his fingers over the rising steam from his plate, emoting disappointment so strongly that he reminded Vince of his junior high assistant principal after a food fight, which Vince undoubtedly started. “All right, I’ll admit Bri can be such a smartass that he’d tempt even a …nun to step out of line.”

Vince nodded, agreeing completely. His favorite nun from his Sunday school days had been Sister Constance Agnes, and if given one look at O’Conner, she would have worn her ruler out on his knuckles and had him saying Hail Mary’s until his tongue dropped off. That passing thought reminded him to give her a visit, maybe bring her a cookie basket.

“—The fact is, man, you started this pissing contest and Bri’s no punk,” Vince smirked, in spite of Rome’s displeased knowing look. “He’ll stand toe to toe with anyone and always back it up…for the most part. You, on the other hand,--” The unspoken insult of Mr. Dirt-slinger Extraordinaire hung between them.

Vince was sick of everyone dumping on him, making him feel like the black sheep. He decided to halt this train before it could get any further out to the station.

“Why does everyone act like this is my fault? I’m the one who’s traumatized. See, no one was…” he scanned his mental dictionary for the appropriate word, and didn’t that just prove that talking things out was hard, especially for someone who lived their life according to the credo of the tall, dark and silent type. Finally finding the right word, he supplied “polite to me about all of _this_...One minute, he’s just there and Jesse’s rambling about petting his hair, Leon’s wants to make him his _special_ cookies, and Let’s hugging and smiling at him like he just told her it’s fifty cent shot night, and Let’s not too keen on the hugging anyone except Mia without throwing a dick punch afterwards.”

He paused to catch his breath, because the real crux of the matter was coming, but it wouldn’t do to give out of steam before he finished bellowing his cloud of righteous indignation to all four corners if he could. “And then, he and Dom are making googlely eyes at each other, while communicating through a language made up entirely of blinks, forehead wrinkling and lip quirks. What the hell is that!”

He was on his last point and he would make sure Pearce heard him loud and extra clearly. “ And then—then, there’s the thing where they like to try to leave body impressions on the Charger’s hood while, I don’t know, apparently eating each other’s face’s and I’m the one with a problem? Dude, I’m traumatized!” He got the impression that he might have yelled that last little bit from the looks from the flock old ladies at the table across the aisle from theirs. Busted volume control happened sporadically when emotions flared, and Vince’s emotions were blazing with volcanic heat of cosmic sunspots.

If Rome hadn’t been elbow deep in clear cutting the forest of food on his plate, he might have patted Vince’s arm or simply punched him to get him to stop freaking out. Rome was a firm believer in using violence to bring peace, only when necessary.

“Honestly, you must think you’ve cornered the market on trauma. Now I feel bad telling you this, because I have seen some _things_ too,” and by the excessive stretch of his eyes that followed, Vince had a sinking suspicion that he really didn’t what to know about those _things_ , “Crazy, strange things that I didn’t need nor ever wanted to see in my life. There’s a reason I made Bri stick around Miami so long when he chomping at the bit to get out here. I made him stay to pay my therapy bills, so don’t act like you’re the only one with hurtin’ eyes and scorched memory. Because trust me, there’s plenty to go around.”

So they could bond over mutual trauma?

Awesome?

That would have been a rather sweet idea had Rome not been inclined to forget and not wallow in the unfortunate knowledge that brain bleach did not, in fact, exist.

Eventually Rome came up for breath and signaled for Vince to give him a second. He drained the last of his Coke, set the glass aside, and turned to Vince and said, “Haven’t you figured it out already? The reason everyone’s so cool, calm and collected in the face of your big gay freakout. It’s cuz you’re the last squeaky wheel. I already told you that they’ve been at this for a while. You’re even slower on the uptake than I previously thought.”

Vince got the big picture; it was the fine details that eluded him. “I got all the answers, genius. It’s just the why’s and the how’s that I’m missing, and without those, trying figure this thing out is doing more than just making my head hurt. So I’m looking at you right now to get the missing pieces.”

The smile volleyed back at Vince was soft at the edges, lazing in the satisfaction that came with enjoying a good meal. Any mounting surliness would now be identified as feigned as the light slope and subtle unwinding of Rome’s muscles betrayed his current blissful disposition. “I feel like I’m going to ask a dumb question: do I look like Dr. Ruth to you? No, I don’t think so.”

If a head snap had accompanied that declaration, then Vince would have been uncomfortably reminded on that movie he saw where Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze wore dresses and drove cross country in a busted Cadillac. He doubted Rome would be amused if he knew that Vince was debating the possibility of him pulling off an off-shoulder red cat suit at the moment.

“Most of what I know is related to your accident. So I’ll give you a hint and see if you can put two and two together before someone else opts to give you ten to the face for being so nosy.”

He gave Rome the benefit of pretending his hearing was failing this time by not saying anything. “Let’s say I can’t count that high, why don’t you tell me a story.”

Rome shrugged ineffectually, then stretched his arms out across the back of the booth to officially begin his digesting his mountain of food like a king on his throne. “So you got into an accident and Brian--remember him? You were a dick to him…he saved you,” Rome stated bluntly. “Why everyone’s treating the truth like a grenade—again, I have no idea, but the cold hard truth you need to accept is that Brian saved you. Like jumped off a moving car, untangled, dunked you in your boy Leon’s sunroof, and leapt off like a freakin’ spider monkey —saved you. I’ll give you a minute to start getting appreciative.”

That weird sense of déjà vu that struck Vince the moment he laid eyes O’Conner was finally given definition as a concrete entity. The weeks following the accident had been an exercise in disorientation, between the fluctuating tides of the painkillers in his system and his head reorienting itself after being tossed head or ass and back again, his memories had become a sieve, catching and clinging to the strangest bits of temporal minutia from that period.

So now he could rightly place the déjà vu and it had nothing to do with teenage flashbacks to his sisters’ Tiger Beat days and the Blond Boy Wonder’s striking resemblance to the heartthrobs that had been on their radar. “The shock’s passed. I think I’m at acceptance now.

Though grief was right over the horizon.

Again, Rome’s expression didn’t convey much surprise. “You ready for shock two?” Without pausing, he said, “Good, now you were under the care of Nurse Ratchet and Dr. House, D called Bri, thanked him and I’m not too sure what happened next. From what I’ve figured,” he explained, air quotes omnipresent as he spoke, “They met up, raced, did some illegal shit and trashed that sick Charger. And don’t get me started on Bri doing an imitation of Mother Teresa and just handing over the keys to the Supra to Big D.”

Vince had no memory of Dom crashing the Charger, but it was an event that stuck out in the temporal soup of his morphine haze. Just like he had memories that fell decisively into the after the fact category, which included vague recollections of Dom heading out on short day trips here and there to pick up the needed parts to fix her. The Rebirth of a Classic became DT’s most watched series of webisodes. Gearheads ate it them up like popcorn.

“And the rest is history,” Rome concluded.

History, at times, fell victim to being the product of the teller and just as subjective as beauty. Neither of which were providing him with substantial clarity as related to the big puzzle box of D and B. “Still not quite getting _it_.” Dom had been nothing but a ladies’ man from the time he learned the difference between scowling and smiling, so his sudden shift in orientation wasn’t as reconcilable as switching from manual to automatic or pizza to tacos.

“They have a lot in common,” Rome offered, and Vince curled his fingers, beckoning to go on. He wanted as much as Rome was willing to spill. “Ok, they like cars, watching things go fast… beer… partying…and, oh yeah, have jacked up middle names. What else do you want, Nancy Drew?” Then, he was off rambling and muttering under his breath about Vince asking the hard questions to someone who was not Roman Pearce, because unlike the news, Rome wasn’t interested in providing news at five, six and eleven.

He opted to let Rome finish muttering to himself, which was another sign of his rising stock of patience.

Also, good information that was not gossip was worth waiting for in the long run.

How bad could Little Boy Blue’s middle name be? Bert? Jed? Bevis?

“Francis,” Rome said without preamble.

Vince found himself in the throes of laughter so hard and grossly obnoxious, it could only be similarly compared to having an out of body experience due to its intensity. Tears causally leaked from his eyes. Dom’s middle name wasn’t much better, but it was a sight better than Francis. Old Big D and Mama Toretto had been diehard Old Blue Eyes fans, so they named Dom accordingly. Sinatra could be a lover and fighter, while Francis only incited more tearful laughs from Vince.

“I almost forgot about their other things...”Scowling, Rome spat, “What two grown men can find exciting about sparkly ponies, I just don’t get.”

Vince pinched the bridge of his nose, if only he had an actually headache to ward off and not the weight of supposedly private information smacking him in the face. The hits just kept on coming, and Dom was doing a bang-up job of breaking his own damn golden rule. The golden rule followed that they would never break promises to each other, and they’ve believed and treated the rule with the same reverence as a shout-out delivered from God’s mouth to their ears.

This was a take it to the grave level secret. Now the shine on their ponies was clouded by betrayal. Princess Celestia wouldn’t approve. Their tats weren’t the business of everyone else, their mamas, and every freaky Francis. Their tats were supposed to stand as a memorial of a drunken mistake committed to skin, serving a bigger purpose of marking days long gone and misspent youth finally laid to rest.

With the previous round of epiphanies and adult conversation, he’d managed to hit his entire reset button regarding laying off Francis. Now he wanted to blow right through neutral and reverse into his old well worn dugout that provided him a trusty platform for believing that everything bad as of late, including Big Mouth Bass Rome knowing the secret, was once again well and truly Brian’s fault.

Never before had Dom broken the Bro Code: bros before hoes, sisters before bros, and in this case, himbo hoes. How could things change so much?


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vince grows up, Rome talks about Brian's dating history, and bros get to be bros again.

Rome, who had remained nonplussed by Vince’s mental hysterics, was wrapping up his analysis of the D-B fling as Vince had asked. “ And they like each other. I can’t mess with that. When Bri’s happy, I’m happy. So if he wants to move out here and do his thing, which includes doing Big D apparently,” he shrugged nonchalantly, “I’ll hold down the fort until he comes back, if he comes back.” Spoken like a true friend, which made Vince feel like a real dick.  
  
Vince exhaled a staggered breath to clear his increasingly too tight throat. The tightness in his throat could only be from overload of syrup and not the ball of anxiety that was stuck in the middle of his chest. Rome had Brian’s back, just as Vince would always have Dom’s. Through thick and thin, sunshine and rain, he’d be there whether Dom wanted him or not; he need only ask. This was why the announcement catalyzed his tongue hurling over the cliff of verbal diarrhea.  
  
Now, he was stuck here—in one of his favorite places, with one of his as of yet least favorite people, talking out the jumbles and knotted feelings in his head. There was a small overblown hope that he’d somehow choked on a chicken wing or got hit on the head by a flying wrench being the reason he was stuck here. He wanted something else instead of his own actions to explain his current stay in this weird wasteland of emotional purgatory. Nope, there was no purgatory actually just the tacky vinyl seats and industrial plastic white table covers clashing with the faded yellow of the interior walls of Jo-Jo’s surrounding him.  
  
Dom once told him about living life a quarter mile at a time. He’d never been slow or stupid, though he wondered if he was still dividing his life by this arbitrary set of measures in the hope that time would somehow remain the same. Roads changed constantly, dipping, rolling, smoothed out, climbed to new places and, most importantly, faded away beneath a cover of dust and dirt.  
  
This was the end of that quarter mile.  
  
Dom was determined to start the next one with Brian riding shotgun with everyone fading faster and faster in the rearview mirror. So Vince was left to face hard truths that couldn’t be medicated with food and a mandatory siesta.  
  
“I’m an asshole,” Vince admitted, gaze sliding about the restaurant and Rome periodically. “I shouldn’t have said anything when Francis, I mean, Brian moving in with Dom.” Really, he was a real bastard. There was no point in debating that immutable fact of life. Some people were givers, doters, while others were assholes out conscious spite or in spite of themselves. Vince was an asshole, who admitted it, but lacked the inability to shake it off.  
  
He wanted to rage again, throw another fit, because acting out was his knee-jerk reflex. But he didn’t. He challenged Rome with facts.  
  
“Get back to me when your bro from the cradle throws a surprise we’re-moving-in-together slash engagement party that everyone but you knew about and up and decides to move half across town with someone who ain’t even family.”  
  
Rome’s face radiated the kind of empathy that could only be found when looking at one’s reflection in a mirror. He pushed aside his plate to arch his body over the space, bringing him closer and almost eye to eye with Vince.  
  
His answer wassimple. “You deal with it. You accept it because change is a part of life. And if I think about it, I mean, _really_ think about it, I should be jealous of Bri…Not in the gay way, of course,” Rome emphasized hastily. “Toretto’s gotta be the _best_ non-circuit driver and mod specialist on the West Coast, while me and Bri got the right coast under lock and key.” Vince had heard just as much at the party. “Put that together and….”  
  
Rome needed not explain further; Vince knew where this going. He stared through the clear patches of glass in between the painted daily specials in the window. His Maxima was a work of art, years of work had converted her from basic to beast, and she could handle just about anything and anyone, with the exception of Dom, the RX6 and the Charger.  
  
So, yeah, he knew precisely from where Rome’s jealousy sprouted—cream settled on top and asking Dom not to be the best was like trying to stop a train through sheer mental force. Even if Dom wouldn’t say it often, if ever, he considered Brian a rare and true equal.  
  
Pearce seemed perfectly content to let them go off together, even if off was only the other side of town. The upside of the D and B excellent adventure was knowing that the team would get dibs on seeing the crazy shit they’d come up with together, if only Vince was willing to sell out years of the status quo to secure it and just accept it all.  
  
Back to goodbyes and happy endings that shouldn’t happen to roughnecks like him, not that this was about him anyway. Dom and Brian had a thing, were a thing and would be together for a long freaking time. He’d seen them circling each other like moths to a flame that only grew larger the closer they got to each other. For all that heat, Vince felt devastatingly cold, as that was the harsh irony that sank into his veins when he realized he’d been left out in the cold.  
  
If Dom had said flat-out that Malibu Ken was who he wanted to go strolling down the beach with, Vince wouldn’t have understood, but he would have made an effort to try. He backed Dom’s play, instead of scratching and kicking up dust like dog waiting for scraps of attention. Since meeting Brian, a guy he really should be thankful to in retrospect, he felt like his back was against the wall and his territory under siege.  
  
Now armed with a new perspective, his feelings just proved Leon even more right; he was an old dog, whose old tricks would be hard to unlearn.  
  
“We’re gonna go back and you’re going to apologize,” Rome laid out succinctly.  
  
There was no other option for Vince, except to agree. “What I said wasn’t cool.” He’d been in the right telling Brian to get the hell out, but tacking on F-A-G-G-O-T at the end had been crossing a line that even he recognized was way left of copacetic. As a consequence, he learned Francis possessed more than a pretty face; he possessed a (pretty) wicked right hook.  
  
Rome’s chuckle was raspy and almost quiet in the din clinking silver ware, sliding plates and unified chewing inside Jo-Jo’s. “You’re lucky Bri handled things. I was ready to take a swing at you myself.”  
  
Despite his insistence that Brian couldn’t fight for shit, Vince could easily attest to Brian holding his own and then some as his ribs gave a stiff pull. Brian had twisted him up like a cracked out spider, bringing him down hard and fast, leaving bafflement to replace Vince’s swelling anger.  
  
Now Rome laughed in earnest, putting all his teeth on display in an almost friendly grin. The smarmy bastard didn’t even have the courtesy of having food stuck in his teeth for Vince’s immature amusement. “When Big D got between you two, he pried y’all apart like the jaws of life. Talking about mad, dude, I thought he was going to suplex you or pile drive you. Guess you learned a lesson, huh? Never roll up on anyone’s boo--male or female spewing garage.”  
  
Dom hadn’t punched him, just stared at him like he was a complete stranger asshole. When he’d finally opted to speak, it was like a sledgehammer being taken to Vince’s ribs, like he’d gotten gut blasted for a second time on the semi. So many times, Vince’s mouth, and by extension, his temper got the better of him. The bitter metallic sting from the corner of his swollen mouth reminded him that this was definitely one of those times.  
  
A man learned from his mistakes. If this were absolutely true, then he should be a rocket scientist by now.  
  
Vince faced a bitter fact. “I was rude.” If he would never, ever, ever drop the B-word on Mia or Letty, he shouldn’t have called Dom’s …Brian or Dom by proxy, a faggot, because his ass couldn’t afford all the checks his mouth was writing.  
  
Speaking of the name game, it gave Vince a small wicked bit of glee to challenge himself by creating new and exciting names for Princess Peach. Just as he lacked understanding of what was going between D and the princess, he also lacked the right word to describe what they were to each other since he needed to start being PC and such.  
  
“What the hell am I supposed to call Fran—Brian anyway? I mean calling him…Dom’s boyfriend sounds, well, wrong.”  
  
Rome, trying to fight a smile, quirked his lips. “Like to Catch a Predator wrong.”  
  
Vince gave Chris Hanson and Co. some thought, not that he really wanted to, but the seed had been planted. “Sorta,” he began, “ _Yeah_ ,” he finished a minute later.  
  
Shifting his body, Rome opened his posture to prepare to hold court on his side of the booth. “Well, I’m gonna tell you what I say. I don’t know if it’s PC or whatever, but it gets me through thinking about it without my head explodin’. And I realize that we’re a lot alike though I’m a million times better looking, and we both have a certain way with words, though I’m far better with them. So I just say what’s easiest to remember.”  
  
To say that Vince wanted Rome to hurry up and get to his point was mildly stating his position. Rome explained haltingly. “Dom gave Bri a Smurf blue Porsche after that race in Mexicali. In my book, giving someone a car means you just wife’d them up or have no sense of value. Beyoncé said put a ring on it. I don’t think she meant piston rings. So his husband, I don’t know. But hell, if it works, it works.”  
  
Vince clutched his sides as torrents of laughter literally doubled him in half. As laughter tanked his composure, Vince knocked over his half full plastic cup. He’d didn’t care in the least that he now looked like he’d thoroughly pissed his pants, because he caught in the throes of hilarious joy picturing Francis as wife-Barbie. Hell, if a video of him making an ass of himself ended up on YouTube under the title _Crazy Man Pisses Pants_ , he’d still be cool with it. Real nuggets of comedy gold had a way of fixing everything.  
  
Rome was unimpressed with Vince’s bout of insane laughter. “Stop howling like a hyena. You’re making people nervous.” Indeed, there were quite a few sets of eyes turned towards their table.  
  
Finally gaining a firm hold on his laughter, Vince took a deep breath, exhaled raggedly, and did his best to appear sober. “Okay, I’m done. Really.”  
  
“Good,” Rome snorted. “Thought long and hard about this, not that I wanted to, so. Just that, you know, if Dom wore white, he’d look like Mr. Clean in a dress. And that would be--”  
  
“Horrifying,” Vince said in a small, hoarse voice. That thought alone could knock him over.  
  
“Exactly. So because Bri’s a long hard walk away from Swamp Thing, I think he could work the white, just not in public unless really, really drunk. Key West is the weird exception.”  
  
Vince had no deliberate intention of stirring the pot this time. His question was more along the lines of a statement of fact. “Just taking a guess here: I wouldn’t imagine O’Conner to be the wears white type. He doesn’t seem much like a pure as the driven snow precious peach.”  
  
Rome made a sound that was some amalgam of a chuckle and a groan. He swiped his hand over his face, though his expression wasn’t wiped away. “He’s my boy. I call him Crazy White Boy out of love and affection, but damn if he isn’t a magnet for crazy people. Gotta say DT is the sanest one yet…Although, I’m not sure that will always be the case. Brian tends to intensify the crazy in just about everyone he’s with.”  
  
Taking exception to Rome’s backhanded compliment was well within his rights. It was a critique that held some truth; things working against Dom: prison, Vince as his best friend (if he was honest about it), and his temper. This was a conversation Rome and Vince should've had weeks ago. This exchange was a part of the time honored tradition upheld by best friends the world over to vet, judge, retain, or destroy the potential love interests of their buds.  
  
Mentally, he fortified himself for the proceeding talk, though he made no promises about staying upright while laughing. “Yeah?”  
  
Holding up three fingers on one hand and pointing to them with the other, Rome initiated his countdown. “Short list of crazy right here,” he said, wiggling three fingers. “To start, we have Monica, Ms. D-E-freaking-A. Girlfriend tracked and tricked people for a living; she was an undercover agent.”  
  
Rome sighed so woefully, he didn’t pay the cute waitress any attention when she made another round of their area, despite her fishing for his attention. “Everything was good until she did the Edward Cullen thing and started stalking his ass. She was too hot to be so crazy. ‘s why I think she was the biggest tragedy of ‘em all.”  
  
If Vince heard one more person mention Twilight, he would be breaking dawn on someone’s face. Bad enough Jesse read that crap. It was even worse that he’d gotten Leon to read them too, who had even tried to explain the plot to him. Vince had to walk away when Leon began to gush about sparkles and the vampire clan named after potpourri. There was only so much Vince would subject himself to. If Rome had earned any cool points in Vince’s book, he’d just lost them.  
  
Rome mock saluted the memory of the ex-Ms. DEA, and fixed his mouth in a tight frown for the next entry on list. “Then, there was Verone.”  
  
What kind of name was that? To Vince, it sounded like a douche that wore silk shirts and had a greasy 90’s ponytail. “Verone?” He parroted, deadpan.  
  
Rome rolled his eyes and sucked his teeth, disappointed in Vince’s lack of lessoning and comprehension skills. “I said _Verone_! You hard of hearing now, too, Old Man? ”  
  
Vince’s reply was a single finger gesture indicating Rome should watch his tone.  
  
Instead of biting the bait, Rome cracked his knuckles against the tabletop, one at a time; a habit Vince was convinced popped up like a tic, happening in greater frequency the longer Rome was forced to sit still. Once done snapping his joints like castanets, Rome got to the point. “Verone gave the best gifts. His swag was so sick, I would’ve dated him.”  
  
Predictably, Vince’s brows reached his hairline at Rome’s announcement that he was not only willing to cross the heterosexual divide to walk on the wild side, but pimp himself for gifts along the way. There weren’t enough gold bars or chrome wheels in the world to make Vince convinced that he would ever say the same about himself.  
  
“I think I could’ve overlooked his ten mile streak of crazy. But his fashion sense didn’t do him any favors. Verone’s taste in clothes was so bad, he would’ve made Ray Charles cry from the ugly. He dressed like his closet was haunted by the spirits of villains of the week from Miami Vice circa 1985.”  
  
Vince had no place to judge the fashion choices of others since he was forever loyal to his t-shirts, wash faded Dickies, and butt ugly combat boots. He’d always heard gay dudes were supposed to have his superhuman fashion sense, but all the evidence he’d seen thus far had overwhelming disproved the stereotypes. Goldilocks dressed like a thrift store reject and from the sound of it, Verone couldn’t find his way out of the eighties with a spotlight and a lighted path.  
  
“Jealousy is a real sickness. Verone began to lose it six months in, started having Bri followed by his mustachioed _associates_ Ren and Stimpy. He tripped total balls when he thought one of our regulars was getting a little too friendly with B…” He idled for a couple of seconds, shaking his head disapprovingly and bites the rim of his lip like a man with solid wall of regrets behind him. “He threatened the guy with—get this, a blowtorch, a bucket, and a rat. After that freakiness, I called Ms. DEA myself to pick up that Fruit Loop.”  
  
Since Vince had already contemplated the possibility that Brian was some sort of succubus, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Brian did indeed possess pheromones or _brujo_ voodoo that attracted the crazy. Dom was generally level-headed, except when blowing his top. He hoped Dom wouldn’t be susceptible to the same trend that followed dating the snow man. If Dom did fall off the edge of sanity by unleashing the kraken of crazy, then Vince knew unequivocally that Dom would be _creative_. Just ask Fenix who’d had the unexpected experience of watching a Dodge Challenger fly.  
  
Vince traced the contours of his sprawling inch absently, and said, “Sounds like Brian doesn’t know when to say when?”  
  
Rome barked out a sharp laugh. “From what I hear about those pony tattoos, neither do you and Dom,” he managed to say with a straight face.  
  
Touché, goddammit.  
  
The last finger demonstrating his list dropped. “Lastly, we’ve got Hobbs. I don’t know where Bri found him, and I really don’t wanna know why he found him. The guy was, like, a Fed, bounty hunter, professional wrestler, Transformer—all in one mountain-sized package. It’s scary that I can say that this dude made Dom look moderately petite.”  
  
As Rome waxed eloquently on Lucas Hobbs list of many faults, he took special note of Rome’s disbelief in Hobbs’ lack of a sense of humor. It wasn’t difficult to imagine someone being immune to the comedic styling of Roman Pearce. Vince was only marginally endeared to him as it was. Bonding over chicken and waffles unexpectedly while hearing O’Conner’s dirt had them making tracks towards being whatever stood closer to friends than sworn enemies.  
  
“Luke was always _on_ , so super intense that he couldn’t eat a sandwich without staring the bread into submission first. And he was hell on the furniture.” Raising his palm to the ceiling, Rome looked like he was expecting a high –five from God in sympathy for the disaster wrought on their stuff by Hobbs. “We ended up covering just about everything in that hot, sticky plastic wrap all grandmas use. Either Hobbs was half minotaur or he had the worse glandular problem I’ve ever seen. Til I met him I didn’t think it was possible to drown in buckets of sweat. Luke showed me wrong.” Rome shook his head in solemn disbelief.   
  
Now Vince was sure he’d literally heard it all. “Sound s like--” _don’t say Francis,_ he warned himself, “Brian makes interesting life choices.”A statement that somehow seemed to emphasize the compatibility of Brian and Dom since both had dated people who looked like creatures from Greek myth and not in a positive way. It took all kinds to make the world and along the way, people sometimes fell for dudes that looked like minotaurs and chicks that would’ve turned Medusa to stone. Such was life, right?  
  
The journey Vince’s attention had taken didn’t impede Rome’s rambling chatter. It was an endless stream that Vince filtered out as he weighed the possibility of ordering another plate of chicken and waffles or the option of being reasonable for once by showing some restraint. A ghostly flash of the spare tire his old man had been sporting the last time he’d ever seen him sprinted through his mind and soundly discouraged him from acerbating the early onset of his hereditary beer gut of doom.  
  
Talking to Roman Pearce about his feelings hadn’t been on his to-do list that day, but the experience had turned out to be what he’d needed, though he didn’t deserve it. Sometimes grown men needed timeouts, especially grown men dealing with the type of row that made him ask where do we go from _here_.  
  
Rome rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “From that look of intense concentration that I’m guessing isn’t actually constipation or gas, I’m thinking you’re ready to wrap this up?”  
  
Admittedly, he was feeling some jumbled combination of confusion, jealousy and fear. Emotions and Vince were about as complex and deep as paint on a wall—what was seen was what you got. And it was futile for Vince to pretend otherwise.  
  
All quarter miles eventually came to an end, and with that final realization, Vince turned to Rome, nodded stiffly as his eyes felt the slightest prickle, and said “Yeah,” gruffly. When he went back, he would apologize to Dom mainly and somehow piece together the words to communicate his doubts, shortfalls, and grievances.  
  
The gaggle of primly dressed church ladies had fluttered out around the time the check appeared at the corner of the table. He grabbed the flimsy slip of filter paper and checked the tab. There was a reason Jo-Jo’s was always packed to capacity—jammed ass to ass—prices this dirt cheap weren’t bound to break the bank.  
  
“All right, let’s jet. If we sit here any longer, my ass’s gonna grow into the vinyl.”  
  
Peace wasn’t so bad, though Vince could hardly understand how Pearce and O’Conner went together. The pair stuck together with the same sticky cohesiveness of peanut butter and jelly. Shrugging, he concluded that some mysteries weren’t be to unraveled.  
  
“Can’t have poor Fran—Brian worrying about you, thinking I mauled you or something. But first, I think this belongs to you…” Vince slid the check over to Rome, whose face was perhaps frozen in mild shock or a small stroke; the amount of food he put away suggested the latter, but Vince couldn’t be too sure. “Yeah, you were the one who said he was a big spender. So spend.” Vince rolled out of the booth without any of the stiffness that lingered post-accident.  
  
He was all renewed spirit and swagger. Just added to his list of worthwhile indulgences: taking the wind out of Roman Pearce’s sails. Freaking magical.  
  
He hadn’t invited Rome to follow him, but he could surely make him pay. Vince stalked out of Jo-Jo’s almost smiling as he did, with Rome’s squawking and hissing behind him.  
  
Things were better already.  


* * *

  
  
This time the thought of returning to the house didn’t feel like Vince was returning to the scene of a crime. All the pieces lay where they were left, the exception being the Skyline having migrated further up the street, leaving his spot available. Though a small thing, inconsequential to most, having his space back was taken as a sign that his luck had taken a turn for the better.  
  
After parking, Vince walked across the yard and easily heard the PS 3 doing its job as exploding waves of triumph, disgusted rage, and a barrage of game play bullets poured through the open windows. Sounded like Halo to him and he’d get on it after taking care of things.  
  
Before Vince could climb the first step to the porch, he noticed he wasn’t alone. On the low-slung porch swing, Barstow Barbie sat rocking the bench with the toe of his scuffed sneaker. His freaky blue eyes, more akin to antifreeze than nature, locked on to him with the precision of a heat-seeking missile.  
  
 _Well, fuck you too, Francis_ , he would’ve said. But without saying a word, he oriented himself towards the porch. There was a slight infusion of expectation in Brian’s body language, a barely perceptible challenge that almost made Vince bristle.  
  
He took deliberately slow steps up the rest of the way, stopping only to volley back Brian’s literal icy stare with a simmering eye-dagger of his own. As Karma didn’t believe in forestalling long overdue conversations, Vince kept his distance, but plastered his back to the still sunwarm porch post with arms twined over his chest, jutted his chin, and schooled his expression into a canvas of stubborn sincerity.  
  
Brian broke the ice. “Listen, I know we’re not friends, but for Dom’s sake, we need to chill out with cold war hostilities, so--”  
  
Abruptly, Vince interjected, “I’m gonna stop you right there, Slim Shady.”He did register Brian’s cocked brow, which appeared less than cocksure. “You and me,” he gestured with a deliberate point of his finger, “will never be friends.”  
  
“Not even pony pals? …Best bronies for life?” Brian countered with a sunny smile.  
  
Vince fixed Brian with a stony look. He gave a quick thought to popping Brian one in the mouth, which would, therefore, put a stop to the inevitable tide of smartass comments. Since he was in the middle of apologizing, he wondered if anyone would believe the slap was due to Restless Nerve Syndrome. Everyone had been witness to his twitches every now and again; Brian would simply have the misfortune of catching a sharp twitch to the face. Dom wouldn’t like that so much and the outcome of that course of action only led to more apologizing, which Vince could do without.  
  
So he shook off Brian’s offer to be bffs and plowed ahead. “Secondly, I’m sorry about what I said.” If Brian thought he’d get more than that, then the peroxide in his hair was seeping into this brain. “And I guess this one is long overdue—thanks for getting my ass off that semi.”  
  
Brian’s smile was all sunshine, puppy dogs and pearly white. “I did what any concerned citizen would do.” That response wasn’t what Vince had been expecting. It did fit into the scheme of who he thought Brian was based on what he’d pieced together from the conversation with Rome.  
  
To pinpoint what exactly stuck in Vince’s craw concerning O’Conner was similar to asking why the stars were so bright. He didn’t know, didn’t care, they just were. Same with the boy band reject, he simply rubbed Vince the wrong way. Like those guys who showed up at races with cars too flashy, too flawless with no signs of wear and tear, but were looking to get noticed like they were hunting for something more than a win. Those were the ones that always pinged his radar as cops. Maybe, he unfairly lumped O’Conner into that group of lying weasels, but his gut didn’t lie. Just ask the Trans, Hector, and Edwin, who’d all been caught in sweeps orchestrated by the same smiling douches that wanted to rub elbows and talk street with them.  
  
“Well, yeah, thanks for being Mr. Citizenship.”  
  
Brian had moved closer gradually, standing now just across from Vince. He swept his arms out warmly. “You wanna hug it out?”  
  
 _Hug smiling Francis?_ , he thought not.  
  
“I don’t think D would…um, like that.” And neither would Vince.  
  
“Maybe, next time,” Brian said.  
  
The Eclipse purred from the top of the block. Pearce had finally caught up. “If you’re looking for Dom, he’s in the back,” Brian added, watching Pearce approach. The Eclipse was a nice ride, but the candy purple Barney paint turned it into a monstrosity.  
  
Vince tipped his head in a slight nod and descended the steps. As he rounded the side of the house that he’d come to recognize as home, Vince spared another thought on Dom’s theory of quarter miles. With a sudden gut twist of regret, he realized that this leg of life’s race was over, but the rest was far from done.  
  
As he entered the backyard, he easily spotted Dom sitting at the old picnic table; his shoulders were hunched, tight, and looked capable of carrying mountains on their massive breadth. When he saw Vince, the blankness on his face was drowned by the swift tide of a mighty glare; one so potent it smothered Vince’s reflexive urge to smirk.  
  
Vince slunk behind Dom, palmed the back of his shiny dome, and planted a wet, albeit brotherly, peck on the top of it. Dom didn’t move to shake him off, just let Vince make his peace in his way.  
  
As they sat in the quiet along the fading border of late afternoon and twilight, they passed the moment just looking at each other, tracking the toll of years, mistakes and celebrations on the man across from the other. Vince was the same guy he’d always been, while Dom had changed, grown into the man that his dad would've been more than proud of.  
  
In this moment, he thought about the people in the house, bound by blood, time and memories. People rotated in and out of the doors of life, some stayed even if they weren’t invited, but like grains of sand in the desert, winds of change picked them up and carried them, blending them into the patchwork of this family. He and Dom were brothers, forever and always, and Vince would love Dom no matter what—distance and blond Abercrombie poster boys be damned. With many more roads to travel, he could fall back with this one.  
  
So he turned a deliberate smile Dom’s way and waited as the elusive gesture did its job, and gradually thawed Dom until he boomeranged a crooked smirk back at Vince.  
  
Vince would start by saying sorry, not half-assing the attempt either. From there they might talk about it, they might not. Letty was sure to dickpunch him later as comeuppance for being an ass and ruining the party. Life would get back to normal that much he could guarantee. If the new normal included Brian, aka Little Boy Blue, hanging around all the time, he’d deal.  
  
Vince might not understand it, but he didn’t have to. Dom was his bro and family was for life.  
  
The End


End file.
